A Tale of Scale: When Your Service Hits a Wall In the world of high-traffic systems, success often brings its own set of challenges. During my internship at TikTok, one of our core payment services—a reliable workhorse built in Go—began showing signs of strain. As TikTok LIVE’s user base grew, the CPU load on this service climbed relentlessly, and we were confronted with incessant stability alarms from services hitting CPU thresholds. We faced a classic engineering dilemma: how do you squeeze mo...