What breaks when your traffic triples?
Dashain begins 11 October. Most businesses here will handle more volume in the next four weeks than in the rest of the quarter combined.
Systems rarely fail because traffic is large. They fail because it arrives all at once, and because several small weaknesses surface in the same hour.
The failures are boring. That is good news, because boring is fixable in ten days.
Stock drift: two customers buy the last unit in the same second, while your stock count and your order record update in separate steps.
Payment retries: a gateway times out, the reserved stock never releases, and nobody tells the customer what actually happened.
Support overflow: messages triple across four channels at once, and replies get duplicated or missed.
Your own team: half are on leave, and the person who knows how to reissue a failed order is at a family tika.
None of this needs a rebuild. It needs ten unglamorous days.
Load test concurrent checkouts, not page views. Make the stock decrement atomic with order creation. Write your failure messages now, while you are calm. Put every inbox in one queue. Keep the three emergency procedures on a single page.
The businesses that come through festive season well are the ones who spent ten quiet days in early October checking boring things.
You have those ten days right now.
