The Highway Tollbooth Bottleneck
A split-screen simulation of why adding more web servers can't fix a database bottleneck: it's like adding lanes to a highway that ends at a single manual toll booth. Auto-scaling the web fleet just floods an unindexed query / maxed connection pool with more concurrent requests, driving CPU thrashing and keeping p99 latency degraded while cloud spend climbs. Toggling 'Index + Redis Cache' intercepts ~80% of requests, DB CPU drops to green, p99 flattens, and the web tier scales back down.
LIVE SIMULATION
HOW THIS RUNS
This is a live, interactive recreation embedded directly on the page — not a static diagram. Step through the scenes above to watch traffic reroute across the tiers in real time. The embedded simulation is recorded on screen, and that capture becomes the content.