Pre-warming the edge before a product launch

Pre-warming the edge before a product launch

A hardware startup in Tel Aviv launched on Product Hunt at midnight. Last launch, the first 5,000 visitors hit a cold cache and saw 4-second loads while every URL went MISS.

This time we pre-warmed the edge on a checklist:

— Generated the list of launch URLs: landing, pricing, docs, three blog posts, all assets
— Ran a crawler from inside each target region — US-East, EU-West, Singapore — 30 min before launch
— Verified each returned cf-cache-status: HIT from the regional POP, not just one
— Re-warmed image variants by requesting each width the responsive markup would ask for
— Held a warm-loop pinging the homepage every 5 min so the hot path never expired

Launch traffic hit a fully warm edge. p75 load in Singapore was 240ms from the first visitor. Warm per-region — a HIT in Virginia means nothing to a reader in Sydney.

The number that mattered: 3.8s of cold-cache delay erased for the first 5,000 visitors.