Scaling Captcha Infrastructure to 1 Billion Requests
How we optimized our distributed solving nodes to handle massive traffic spikes while maintaining sub-second latency.
Handling a billion requests isn't just about adding more servers—it's about fundamentally rethinking how you handle state, concurrency, and routing.
The Challenge
At CaptchaSonic, our primary metric is Time-to-Solve (TTS). When a detailed CAPTCHA challenge arrives, every millisecond counts.
Did you know? Our average TTS for standard reCAPTCHA challenges is now under 1.2 seconds.
Our Architecture
We moved from a monolithic queue to a partitioned, region-aware dispatch system.
1. Geo-DNS Routing
Traffic is routed to the nearest edge node.
2. Edge Processing
Requests are validated and sanitized at the edge using Cloudflare Workers.
3. Solver Mesh
Our custom "Solver Mesh" dynamically allocates browser instances based on difficulty scoring.
// Simplified logic of our dispatcher
async function dispatchJob(job: Job) {
const complexity = analyzeComplexity(job.payload);
const region = await getOptimalRegion(job.origin);
return solverMesh.assign(region, complexity, job);
}
Results
Since implementing the new mesh architecture, we've seen:
- 99.99% Uptime over the last quarter.
- 40% Reduction in cloud costs due to smarter resource allocation.
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