🚀 Scaling Beyond 1M RPS: What It Takes to Hit 10M RPS (With Code & Architecture)

📌 “We thought hitting 1M RPS was the peak — until we needed 10M. Scaling to a million requests per second took serious optimizations, but pushing beyond that was an entirely different beast. Here’s how we tackled it, what broke along the way, and the architecture that finally got us there.”

🔥 Why 1M RPS Wasn’t Enough

After scaling our Node.js app to 1M requests per second (RPS), we assumed we were in the clear. But as traffic grew, we ran into new bottlenecks:

🚨 Load Balancers Struggled — Our Nginx setup became the new chokepoint.
🚨 Databases Became the Bottleneck Again — Even with caching, write-heavy operations suffered.
🚨 Network Congestion Increased — API response times spiked due to data transfer overhead.
🚨 Server Costs Skyrocketed — Simply adding more machines wasn’t sustainable.

We needed a fundamentally different approach to hit 10M RPS efficiently.

🔍 Diagnosing the New Bottlenecks

Before throwing more servers at the problem, we dug into our performance metrics. These were the biggest pain points: