podarujdobro.pl is a charitable platform we built for a foundation that connects donors with people in need. On Friday, March 27th, we moved it from a beta subdomain to production. That same evening, a single Facebook post turned a quiet launch into one of the most intense scaling events we’ve handled.
The story behind the traffic
On February 14th, a 17-year-old named Dominik was helping a woman with a stroller exit a train at a station near Warsaw. The doors closed on his arm and the departing train dragged him under. He lost both legs and fingers on one hand.
A fundraiser was set up on our platform to cover modern prosthetics (over 1 million PLN — the national health fund covers only about 40,000 PLN) and first-year rehabilitation costs estimated at 150,000 PLN. The goal was nearly 1.4 million PLN.
On the evening of our launch, Damian Żurawski — a local politician and social activist — shared the fundraiser on Facebook. The post exploded: over 20,000 reactions, 1,500 comments, and 9,700 shares that same evening. Thousands of people clicked through to donate, all hitting our platform at once. In the following days, the story was picked up by national media including TVP Warszawa, Eska, and Fakt. The fundraiser was later renewed by TVP Warszawa to cover ongoing rehabilitation and home adaptation costs.
The podarujdobro.pl fundraising page for Dominik, as shown during a TVP Warszawa broadcast.
The traffic surge
Within an hour of the Facebook post going live, traffic began climbing steeply. By 19:45, we were handling 5,000 requests every five minutes. By 20:45, it was 23,000. At 21:20, we peaked at nearly 78,000 requests in a single five-minute window — roughly 260 requests per second.
That’s a 200x increase from our baseline — the kind of traffic most platforms never see on day one.
The curve tells the story: exponential growth over about two hours, followed by sustained high traffic well past midnight as the post continued spreading across Facebook.
Scaling in real time
As the traffic climbed, we monitored the platform and began scaling proactively. The database was the first component to feel the pressure — CPU utilization climbed steadily as thousands of concurrent donation requests hit the backend.
Within minutes of detecting elevated load, we upgraded the database tier, added application capacity, and enabled horizontal autoscaling across the cluster. The platform was fully stabilized within the hour, and the scaling infrastructure we put in place that evening continued to absorb traffic automatically through the night.
The result
The platform held. Over 20,000 donors completed their contributions through podarujdobro.pl. The full fundraiser goal of nearly 1.4 million PLN was reached in just over 24 hours — enough to cover Dominik’s prosthetics and first year of rehabilitation.
A platform that scales with impact
Since launch night, podarujdobro.pl has continued to power fundraisers for people in need. The platform scales automatically with demand — whether it’s a quiet weekday or another viral campaign. No manual intervention needed, no downtime during deployments, no limits on how many donors can contribute at once.
When your platform supports causes that matter, reliability isn’t a technical detail — it’s a responsibility.
Key numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Peak traffic | 77,692 req/5min (~260 req/s) |
| Traffic multiplier | ~200x from baseline |
| Total donors | 20,000+ |
| Amount raised | ~1.4 million PLN |
| Time to reach goal | Just over 24 hours |
| Facebook post reactions | 20,262 |
| Facebook shares | 9,700 |
Building podarujdobro.pl and watching it serve its purpose under real pressure — helping thousands of people contribute to Dominik’s recovery — is one of the most rewarding projects we’ve delivered. The platform continues to power fundraisers for people in need, now backed by infrastructure designed to handle whatever comes next.
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