Devs: with only 64 validator nodes, would an attack by first spamming the network with tx's and then dDOSing a handful of validators not lead to the remaining validators getting overwhelmed and crash? It seems a rather vulnerable setup, esp considering a validator node needs 8GB RAM to handle 5K tx. Even on an expensive VPS, there would not be a lot of room for additional load.
Or am I wrong?
This is definitely a possibility regardless if we are using 64 or 100 validators. Validators need to have sufficient bandwidth, RAM and processing power to handle large amount of transactions and the recent and ongoing RC tests are going to expose these vulnerabilities. With these vulnerabilities exposed our Devs can work out a solution to prevent these problems from happening before we go on mainnet.