How to Handle Sudden Traffic Spikes
Stay up when traffic jumps 50x
What you'll learn
- Finding and caching the pages everyone hits
- Why autoscaling is slow and the database breaks first
- Cutting load with feature flags and waiting rooms
- Rate limits, and what to fix after the spike
In this video, we'll look at what to do when a celebrity shares your app and traffic jumps 50 times in 10 minutes. We'll cover finding the pages everyone is hitting and caching them behind a CDN, adding servers with autoscaling, and why the database is usually the first thing to break.
We'll also look at turning off expensive features with feature flags, using a waiting room to protect signup and checkout, and rate limits that stop clients retrying in a loop.
By the end, you'll know how to keep your app up during a sudden spike and what to fix afterwards.
