Cloudflare Cache's Blind Spot: The Cost of Bypass Rules

Last month, I started noticing unexplained spikes in server load on my blog, mustafaerbay.com , especially when publishing new articles or when popular content received traffic. I manage over 13 Docker containers on my own VPS, and when one started misbehaving, others would swap, kcompactd would eat 90% of the CPU, and even SSH connections became impossible to establish. This was surprising for a site sitting behind Cloudflare. I even recall a moment when the Astro build process consumed 2.5 GB