Game time: A playbook to (unsuccessfully) 10x in a week and (successfully) 10x in a year
summary
A team tries and fails to scale in a week, then succeeds in five months by building load tests with Ksix API tests then full-browser simulation, setting a pathological RPS target (sustain for 5 minutes), and converting a 60-call onboarding flow down to two essential calls. A client-side request-handler buffers and mocks calls, queues submissions to workers, and flattens spikes; peak minute traffic and a single-hour onboarding record hit production but systems stay business as usual with 15–20s latencies only on the legacy choke point.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Super Bowl scaling story
- 1:06Last-minute Super Bowl ad request
- 3:56Scaling in a week strategy
- 6:24Need for load testing
- 9:14Super Bowl weekend results
- 12:21Lessons and long-term rebuild
- 15:32Onboarding API calls reduced
- 18:42Request handler throughput
- 21:29Final load testing results
- 23:15Scaling journey takeaways
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