[devit]

Or perhaps switch to well-engineered software actually properly designed to be served on the public Internet.

Clearly generating zip files, writing them fully to disk and then sending them to the client all at once is a completely awful and unusable design, compared to the proper design of incrementally generating and transmitting them to the client with minimal memory consumption and no disk usage at all.

The fact that such an absurd design is present is a sign that most likely the developers completely disregarded efficiency when making the software, and it's thus probably full of similar catastrophic issues.

For example, from a cursory look at the Forgejo source code, it appears that it spawns "git" processes to perform all git operations rather than using a dedicated library and while I haven't checked, I wouldn't be surprised if those operations were extremely far from the most efficient way of performing a given operation.

It's not surprising that the CPU is pegged at 100% load and the server is unavailable when running such extremely poor software.

[Ndymium]

Just noting that the archives are written to disk on purpose, as they are cached for 24 hours (by default). But when you have a several thousand commit repository, and the bots tend to generate all the archive formats for every commit…

But Forgejo is not the only piece of software that can have CPU intensive endpoints. If I can't fence those off with robots.txt, should I just not be allowed to have them in the open? And if I forced people to have an account to view my packages, then surely I'd have close to 0 users for them.

[devit]

Well then such a cache needs obviously to have limit to the disk space it uses and some sort of cache replacement policy, since if one can generate a zip file for each tag, that means that the total disk space of the cache is O(n^2) where n is the disk usage of the git repositories (imagine a single repository where each commit is tagged and adds a new file of constant size), so unless one's total disk space is a million/billion times larger than the disk space used by the repositories, it's guaranteed to fill the disk without such a limit.