Why my portfolio sent 476 requests a minute

I opened DevTools on my portfolio and the network tab was flooded: 476 requests to cooking?_rsc=… in a minute, and it kept going while I did nothing.

Narrowing it down

Working with Claude Code, I reproduced it with a headless browser so I could count requests instead of eyeballing them.

• Production only. Against the live site: about 40 requests every 10 seconds. Against next start locally: the normal three prefetches, then silence.
• Same hash every time. The _rsc value never changed, so the browser was asking for the same thing over and over.
• Every link, not one page. It happened for every next/link target: the home page, /cooking and each entry.

That ruled out my own code. Something differed between local and production, and the only moving part in between was the host.

The cause

Next.js 16.3 prefetches with a "segment prefetch" request, sent with a next-router-segment-prefetch header. A correct response is a small piece of the route tree. Through the Netlify runtime it came back as a full page payload instead, so the client never got what it expected and kept asking again.

The fix

I set prefetch={false} on every <Link> in the app. Navigation works exactly as before and pages simply aren't prefetched. I left a note to retest after the next Next.js or Netlify plugin upgrade and remove the workaround if it's fixed.

What I took from it

• When something only breaks in production, test the same request locally and in production and compare. That one comparison told me the bug wasn't in my code.
• A workaround should carry its own expiry date. Mine is written down next to the fix, so it doesn't become permanent by accident.