Handling Traffic Spikes
Your e-commerce platform handles 1,000 requests per second on a normal day. Then Black Friday hits, and suddenly you're getting 50,000 requests per second. Servers crash, the database melts down, and thousands of customers see error pages instead of the deals they came for.
This is the challenge of traffic spikes, and it's one of the most common ways production systems fail.
What makes traffic spikes particularly treacherous is that they expose every weakness in your architecture simultaneously. That database query that takes 50ms under normal load? It takes 5 seconds when the connection pool is exhausted. That service that gracefully handles 1,000 concurrent users? It falls over at 10,000. The system that passed all your load tests? It crumbles under real-world traffic patterns you never anticipated.
Traffic spikes are inevitable. Product launches go viral. Flash sales attract millions. Breaking news sends everyone to your site simultaneously. A celebrity mentions your product. A bug in a client causes retry storms. The question isn't whether you'll face a spike, but whether your system will survive it.
In this chapter, we'll explore why traffic spikes are so dangerous, the complete toolkit for handling them, and how to combine strategies into a resilient architecture.