Running a browser games portal with more than 56,000 game pages teaches you one lesson fast: the interesting engineering is not the game itself, it is everything around it. A game page is small. Fifty-six thousand of them, requested in unpredictable spikes whenever a game gets shared, is a different problem. The choices that kept our site stable are boring, and that is exactly why they work.

First, treat game pages as static content. A game listing does not change every minute. Its title, description and category are stable, and the game file itself changes rarely. So we serve pages that are built ahead of time rather than assembled from a database on every request. The database still exists, but it is not in the hot path for a normal page view. When a page does not need fresh data, do not ask the database for it. That single decision removes the most common failure mode for a content-heavy site: a traffic spike turning into a database queue.

Second, load the game only when the visitor asks for it.…