Let’s Handle 1 Million Requests per Second, It’s Scarier Than You Think!

AI Summary

The video provides a comprehensive technical deep dive into the challenges and solutions for handling one million HTTP requests per second, a scale comparable to major services like Uber and Netflix. The presenter, Cododev, begins by benchmarking Node.js server performance on a Mac Studio, comparing frameworks like Express, Fastify, and his custom Cpeak framework. He then transitions to Amazon Web Services, demonstrating the setup of powerful EC2 instances and an RDS PostgreSQL database, highlighting the substantial costs involved (e.g., $30/hour for the testing infrastructure). Initial tests reveal that network speed (50 Gbps limit) and database I/O are significant bottlenecks, with PostgreSQL struggling to achieve high write/read throughput even with increased IOPS, leading to thousands of dollars in monthly costs. Cododev introduces Redis as an in-memory database solution, showcasing its superior performance for writes and reads, especially when scaled using Redis Cluster mode, and explains how to mitigate database I/O limitations by batch-syncing data from Redis to PostgreSQL. For CPU-intensive operations, Node.js proves insufficient, prompting a rewrite of the application in C++ using the Drogon framework and RapidJSON parser. This C++ implementation, running on highly network-optimized AWS 'beast' machines (C8GN.c5.48xlarge with 600 Gbps network), successfully achieves over one million requests per second for a complex patch request. The video culminates in a massive test involving 60 smaller AWS instances bombarding a C++ server, which handles two billion requests and moves 60 terabytes of data in 30 minutes with minimal errors. Cododev emphasizes the critical importance of algorithmic thinking and efficient code over simply scaling hardware, while also discussing AWS load balancer limitations and the necessity of reserving capacity for extreme traffic. He concludes by detailing the $2,000 cost for the video's testing and research, and promotes his open-source projects and Node.js course.

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