u/deepredv1

I'm hosting off of Linode and when a wave of bots hit my site, Linode CPU usage shoots up to 100-200%. My Linode plan is only 1 core, so this is not ideal because it slows the site down. However, when I run 'top', or look at the pm2 usage, the maximum CPU usage I've seen has been 1%.

I'm working on better rate limiting/firewalls, but what is this discrepancy from? How are these bots able to aggressively spam my site and slow it down (open file errors) but the processes on the computer never seem stressed?