No Room for Downtime: Building EventStripe to Withstand 10,000+ Concurrent Users

Behind the scenes of a ticketing platform built for the moment everything happens at once

When you sell tickets for high-demand events, you don’t get gradual traffic. You get a wave. Thousands of people, all clicking “Buy Now” within the same 30 seconds.

That’s exactly what we designed EventStripe for.

The goal: keep the system fully responsive under 10,000+ concurrent users — not just during the day, but in the exact minute after a launch goes live.

This isn’t just scaling. It’s panic-proofing.

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The challenge

• Massive short-term bursts

• Payment processing under pressure

• Seat reservations in real time

• Zero tolerance for lag or errors

These aren't hypothetical problems. They're real user behavior in action.

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How we built for the surge

We didn’t try to over-optimize. We built what we know works — systems that can take a hit and keep going.

1. Traffic isolation

We split the platform into independently scalable zones: payments, seating logic, admin interfaces.

2. Queue-based processing

We built custom queues with retry logic, backoffs, and prioritization — especially around payment gateways and ticket inventory.

3. Real-time monitoring

Grafana dashboards + ELK logs. Every major component had its own visibility layer. If something slowed down, we saw it instantly.

4. Safe CI/CD

We used Jenkins to enable releases even on launch days. Canary deploys, fast rollbacks, no fear.

5. Aggressive stress testing

We mimicked real spikes: timed launches, group checkouts, race conditions. The goal was not to guess how it would behave — but to see it break, then fix it.

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The stack

• Java 20 + Spring (backend)

• Next.js 14 (frontend)

• Docker + Kubernetes (infra)

• Jenkins (CI/CD)

• Grafana + ELK (observability)

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Results

We simulated a 9,000+ session spike.
The system stayed stable.
No slowdowns, no unhandled exceptions — just tickets sold.

We’re not claiming magic. We’re saying: with the right architecture, you don’t need luck.

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If you’re building something under pressure — or planning to — we’d love to hear what strategies worked for you.

This project was designed and tested by H‑Studio — a development team focused on long-term, backend-heavy digital products that scale.