Staying Open for Business on the Busiest Internet...

Your e-commerce store has a sale scheduled for midnight. You've spent weeks preparing: discounted inventory loaded, email campaign fired, social media countdown ticking. At 11:59 PM, traffic is normal. At 12:00:01 AM, thirty thousand users simultaneously click "Shop Now." Your single-process Node.js server gets hit with a wall of concurrent requests—product lookups, cart operations, inventory checks, checkout flows. The event loop, which was humming along handling a few dozen requests per second