5 ways to prevent your API from crashing under heavy load
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Millions of users are flooding your app, eager to browse, buy, and check out—all at once.
But instead of celebrating, you're battling slow responses, overloaded servers, and rising infrastructure costs.
And throwing more servers at the problem won't be enough. Scaling at this level demands smart traffic management, request prioritization, and bulletproof resilience. Without the right System Design patterns, your system (and your business) will crash under pressure.
Luckily, the same battle-tested strategies used by FAANG companies can help you scale efficiently, avoid bottlenecks, and keep costs under control.
Today, I'm covering 5 strategies for handling billions of API requests without slowing down, crashing, or overspending, including:
Control & route incoming requests – Filter, validate and prioritize traffic before it hits your backend.
Load balancing & distribution – Spread requests across systems to prevent bottlenecks.
Rate limiting & request filtering – Prevent abuse, optimize traffic flow, and ensure fairness.
Handling failures gracefully – Avoid retry storms, manage failovers, and keep services responsive.
Observability & optimization – Monitor, analyze, and continuously improve system performance.
Let’s go.
5 strategies for scaling for billions of requests#
Managing billions of user requests is a complex challenge that requires a series of strategies to efficiently handle and resolve them based on priority and criticality. These strategies evaluate the validity of each request before routing it to the backend for processing.
We can simplify this process by categorizing these strategies into a step-by-step approach for assessing incoming requests.
Here are the five key pillars you must understand to handle massive API traffic:
Control and route the incoming requests
Distribute the request across systems
Implementing rate limiting
Deal with edge cases
Observability and continuous optimization
When a client sends a request, it passes through several microsecond-level checks—such as authentication, validation, and request filtering—before reaching the backend.
Understanding System Design requires us to understand each step in the process and explore how these steps work in tandem to serve all sorts of user queries.
Below, we'll expand on key strategies for efficiently handling billions of requests!
