How We Scaled Our Node.js App to Handle 1 Million Requests Per Second (With Code & Architecture)

🚀 “We thought our API was ready for scale. Then it crashed — repeatedly. Users complained, investors worried, and we knew we had to fix it fast. Here’s exactly how we went from handling a few thousand requests per second to over 1 million RPS — without burning through server costs.”

🔥 The Day Everything Broke

It started on a Friday evening. We had just launched a new feature on our Node.js-based platform, expecting some traffic spikes but nothing too crazy.

At first, things were fine. Then, boom — our servers froze.

🚨 Database queries started timing out.
🚨 CPU usage spiked to 99%.
🚨 API response times went from 200ms to 10 seconds.
🚨 Users started leaving.

We scrambled to add more server instances, but it was like trying to put out a wildfire with a water gun. Something was deeply wrong.

That weekend, we locked ourselves in a war room, fueled by coffee and panic, and decided to rebuild our system for extreme scale.

After months of work, we went from a broken system to handling 1M+ requests per second with ultra-low latency.