Monero remote nodes overloaded due to 'dozens of large 150-input transactions'

Public Monero remote nodes¹ were apparently overloaded today² after someone started broadcasting dozens of large 150-input transactions³, which were spotted by Rucknium⁴ (probably around blocks 3144650-3144700⁵):

About an hour ago someone broadcasted dozens of large 150-input transactions. The txpool has many transactions waiting to be confirmed. In these circumstances remote nodes become overloaded because wallets are asking for the txpool data.

Rucknium also mentioned 0xFFFC’s⁶ ongoing work⁷ trying to locate and fix any Monero node code bottlenecks that are causing the overload.

This incident could potentially be connected to the recent spam attack against Monero that started around March 5th⁸.

This is an ongoing story and the report will be updated when new information is available.

Update: add reference link to relevant PR⁹ by selsta discussing performance bottleneck triggered by the high-input txs intermittently occurring since last month (credit to c​haserene for sharing).