🔗 Creating a poll that doesn't crash under load

During the recent Nerdland Festival, a poll designed for a 3.5K audience faced significant challenges under heavy traffic. Originally, the setup used serverless hosting and a cloud database, but load tests revealed that the app dropped to a 26% success rate at 250 requests per second due to write queuing issues.

Tim Broddin pivoted to Cloudflare's Durable Objects, which manage requests in a single-threaded manner, completely eliminating write contention.

This adjustment improved response times from 4 seconds to 150 milliseconds and achieved a 100% success rate at 1500 requests per second. Additional safeguards included a backup system and a TUI control panel to manage potential UI failures.

The project demonstrated the importance of resilience in high-demand environments, marrying technology with practical solutions.