Scaling a content platform to 480K monthly visitors without a rewrite
The team was convinced they needed a new architecture. The data said otherwise.
Traffic grew from 3M to 48M monthly visitors in under two years. Mobile pages took 6–9 seconds to load, on-call was paged 3–5 times a week, and engineering had a 14-month rewrite proposal on the table. Leadership didn't like either path.
Four weeks of profiling before committing to any direction. Three unindexed queries accounted for 74% of database load — fixed in week one. The rest traced to synchronous image resizing and a misconfigured CDN cookie rule that had been bypassing the cache for six months. The rewrite proposal was shelved.
P75 mobile load time dropped from 7.8s to 1.4s. On-call pages fell from 4.2 to 0.3 per week. Infrastructure spend decreased 21% on the same codebase.
They killed our rewrite proposal in week two. It was the right call. We were about to spend fourteen months solving the wrong problem.
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