High-Load Development

Systems That Hold Up
Under Any Load

We engineer web platforms designed for millions of concurrent users — with horizontal scaling, intelligent caching, and zero-downtime architecture baked in from the start.

Discuss your project

Our High-Load Toolbox

Nginx
Reverse Proxy / Load Balancer
Event-driven architecture handles 50K+ concurrent connections per server without thread-per-connection overhead.
PHP / Go
Application Layer
PHP with FPM for mature codebases; Go for latency-critical microservices where concurrency model matters most.
Redis
Distributed Cache & Session Store
In-memory data structures with sub-millisecond reads absorb 80–95% of database read traffic at peak load.
PostgreSQL
Primary Database
Streaming replication, partitioning, and connection pooling via PgBouncer handle write-heavy transactional workloads.
Kafka
Message Queue & Event Bus
Decouples services and provides durable, replayable event streams for async processing at any throughput.
Kubernetes
Container Orchestration
Horizontal Pod Autoscaler reacts to CPU/memory/custom metrics and scales the app tier within 30–60 seconds.
CDN
Edge Caching (Cloudflare/Fastly)
Static and semi-dynamic assets served from edge PoPs cut origin requests by 60–80% and reduce global latency.
ClickHouse
OLAP / Analytics
Columnar storage with vectorised execution answers analytical queries over billions of rows in seconds, not minutes.

How We Design for Scale

Design for 10× peak from day one

We size infrastructure for 10× the expected peak load, not average load. This isn't over-engineering — it's the difference between a smooth traffic spike and an all-hands incident at 2am. Auto-scaling policies then right-size costs during normal operation.

Every data access pattern is modelled before we write the first query. We identify hot paths, design the cache key strategy, and ensure that the database is never a single point of contention.

Stateless application tier

Application servers hold no local state. Sessions live in Redis, uploads go directly to object storage, and any node can handle any request. This makes horizontal scaling trivial — adding capacity is just incrementing a replica count.

We use blue/green or canary deployments to achieve zero-downtime releases, even for schema migrations, using techniques like expand-contract and online schema change tools.

Read/write separation and read replicas

For most applications, reads outnumber writes 10:1 or more. We route read queries to one or more streaming replicas and keep the primary database focused on writes. This distributes load and provides a natural failover target.

Observable from day one

Every system we build ships with structured logging (JSON → Elasticsearch), distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry → Jaeger), and metrics dashboards (Prometheus → Grafana). You see throughput, latency percentiles, and error rates — not just uptime.

How We Build It

01

Load profile analysis

We model your traffic: peak RPS, request distribution, read/write ratio, data volume growth rate. This defines the architecture before any code.

02

Architecture decision records

Every significant decision (database choice, caching strategy, queue selection) is documented with alternatives considered and the reasoning behind the choice.

03

Two-week delivery sprints

Working, testable software every sprint. We demo on Friday and ship to staging. No multi-month integration phases.

04

Continuous load testing

Gatling or k6 load tests run in CI against staging. Performance regressions are caught before they reach production.

05

Runbook and handoff

We document the system architecture, operational procedures, and on-call playbook so your team can own it confidently after handoff.

Load & Stress Testing

We use k6 and Gatling to simulate realistic traffic patterns — spike tests, soak tests, and gradual ramp-up scenarios. Target: sustain 10× average load for 30 minutes with p99 latency under 200ms.

Chaos Engineering

We deliberately kill nodes, saturate network interfaces, and simulate database failovers to verify that the system degrades gracefully rather than failing catastrophically.

Database Query Profiling

Every slow query (>50ms on staging) is investigated. We use EXPLAIN ANALYZE, index analysis, and query rewriting to eliminate N+1 patterns and full-table scans.

Automated Test Suite

Unit tests for business logic, integration tests for API contracts, and end-to-end tests for critical user flows. Coverage targets are defined per service, not globally.

What We've Actually Built

E-commerce · Eastern Europe
A monolithic PHP platform serving a major retail brand was hitting its ceiling at 800 concurrent users. Black Friday traffic — 6× baseline — caused cascading timeouts and a full outage lasting 4 hours.
We extracted the product catalogue and search into a dedicated service backed by Elasticsearch, introduced Redis caching at the session and product level, migrated to read replicas for all reporting queries, and deployed the app tier on Kubernetes with HPA.
10M+Daily active users
Throughput gain
0Outages since launch
SaaS Platform · Western Europe
A B2B SaaS product with 200 enterprise clients needed to process and index 50 million document events per day while keeping search response times under 100ms.
We designed an event pipeline using Kafka for ingestion, a Go-based indexing service writing to both PostgreSQL (OLTP) and ClickHouse (OLAP), and a search API backed by Elasticsearch with query result caching in Redis.
50M+Events/day
<80msSearch p99
99.97%Uptime SLA
Media & Publishing · Global
A news platform with viral content spikes needed to handle sudden 20× traffic surges (breaking news events) without pre-provisioning expensive capacity 24/7.
We implemented multi-layer CDN caching with stale-while-revalidate, moved image processing to a dedicated Go microservice with S3 origin, and configured Kubernetes VPA + HPA to autoscale the API tier from 3 to 40 pods within 90 seconds of a traffic spike.
20×Spike absorption
90sScale-out time
70%Cost reduction
Marketplace · CIS Region
A classified-ads marketplace needed to support real-time search across 30 million listings with faceted filtering, geo-search, and personalised ranking — all under 150ms.
We designed a write-through Elasticsearch cluster with a custom scoring model, asynchronous index updates via Kafka consumers, and a GraphQL search API with aggressive response caching. Listing writes go to PostgreSQL; Elasticsearch syncs within 200ms.
30MListings indexed
<120msSearch p95
200msIndex sync lag

Facing a high-load challenge?

Tell us about your traffic, your pain points, and your timeline. We'll respond within one business day with a technical assessment.