<b>The flash-sale site cold every single morning</b>

<b>The flash-sale site cold every single morning</b>

A daily-deals site dropped new products at 9am sharp. Every drop meant brand-new URLs that no edge had ever cached. The instant 20,000 deal-hunters arrived, all of them hit cold cache simultaneously, all of them fell through to origin, and the first two minutes of every sale ran on origin under peak load. Page times spiked to 3s in Chicago right when it mattered.

We added a cache-warming step to the publish pipeline. At 8:55am a job pre-fetches every new product URL through each major edge region, so the cache is hot before the doors open.

The 9am origin spike flattened: edge cache-hit at launch went from near 0% to 98%. Chicago page time at the drop held at 40ms instead of 3s. Origin never saw the surge.

The number that mattered: launch-minute cache-hit 0% to 98%.