Live marketplace rebuilt for launch-day traffic

Placeholder. Every figure on this page is invented. Replace before launch.

The situation

Trading card platforms have a specific traffic shape: almost nothing, then a set release, then almost nothing. The previous system treated every request as equally important, so when the spike arrived, the order path competed with image loading and recommendation queries for the same connection pool.

What we built

The core decision was deciding what was allowed to break.

• The order path — placing, matching and settling a trade — was isolated onto its own resources with its own budget, and made the only strictly consistent part of the system.
• Everything else — browsing, collection views, price history, recommendations — reads from caches that are allowed to be a few seconds stale, because a price chart lagging is invisible and an order failing is not.
• Queueing during a release replaced the previous behaviour of accepting every request and timing out on most of them. A visible position in a queue is a much better experience than an unexplained spinner.

Why it holds

Not because the code is clever, but because the failure modes were chosen deliberately. Under load the platform gets less rich, not less correct.