Five M4 Mac Minis. Thunderbolt cables. A mapped binary file replaces the database. Production infrastructure at WakaiCorp scares enterprise architects, cloud vendors are horrified. Notice how we are able to process millions of requests with latencies that a high-frequency trading firms would find acceptable.

Production. Real users, real data, real money flowing through machines you could fit in a backpack.

Learning from HFT and Gaming

High-frequency trading firms measure latency in nanoseconds. They colocate servers in exchange buildings, use kernel bypass networking, and memory-map their data. Every microsecond is millions in arbitrage.

Game backends handle millions of concurrent players with sub-16ms response times. They use direct memory access, custom protocols, and the simplest possible data structures.

Notice what they don't use? Kubernetes. Microservices. JSON APIs. Database abstraction layers. The infrastructure stack that marketing insists you need? When you need performance don't touch it.

When microseconds equal money or milliseconds delay player bliss, you find what actually matters: memory access patterns, cache lines, and the speed of light.

The Binary Revolution

Mmap'd binary files replace databases. Direct memory access to persistent storage. The data structure IS the database. No ORM, no query language, no serialization overhead. Just pointers and structs, like every AAA game engine and trading system.

FFI + mmap in OpenResty. Your data lives at memory addresses. Reading is dereferencing a pointer. Writing is assignment. The kernel handles persistence. It is what Unreal Engine does. It is what NYSE's matching engine does. It is what we do.

The architects object: "But what about ACID properties?" The kernel provides them. "But what about querying?" Arrays and indexes, like game physics engines. "But what about scaling?" Buy another Mac Mini. They're $599.

Thunderbolt: The Secret Weapon

10GB to the network. 80Gb/s between machines. Lower latency than most cloud interconnects. Direct memory access across the wire. It is basically PCIe over a cable—the same technology HFT firms use for inter-server communication, just without the $100K price tag.

We achieve response times that cloud architectures can't touch, using hardware from the Apple Store and techniques from Quake 3. Sometimes the future is just remembering what already works.

The Speed of Simplicity

Memory-mapped files: 100 nanosecond access. Thunderbolt networking: 80Gb/s throughput. No virtualization overhead, no container orchestration, no service mesh latency. Just electrons moving through silicon at the speed game engines require.

A request comes in. OpenResty routes it. Lua + FFI reads directly from mapped memory. Response goes out. The same pattern every FPS server uses: read state, compute update, send delta. No database round trip, no cache layer, no message queue.

Our architecture can handle more traffic than startups with 50-engineer platform teams. Not because we're smarter. Because we learned from industries where latency actually costs money.

Geographic Redundancy, Game-Style

Three Minis in the main location. Two in a different city. Not for disaster recovery—for latency optimization. Like game servers, we put compute close to users. Like trading systems, we replicate state constantly.

Sync is deterministic replay, familiar from RTS games. Every write gets journaled and replayed on other nodes. No consensus protocols, no distributed systems theory. Everyone runs the same simulation.

If a node dies, another takes over in milliseconds. Not because we're clever, but because we're not doing anything clever. Simple systems fail simply and recover simply.

Performance Is Physics, Not Philosophy

The cloud sells you marketing philosophy: "infinite scale," "managed complexity," "enterprise-grade." Gaming and HFT buy physics: cache lines, memory bandwidth, network latency. One makes PowerPoints. The other makes money.

Modern hardware is incredibly powerful. An M4 Mini has unified memory architecture that would have been a supercomputer a decade ago. The only reason you think you need the cloud is because your software stack is fighting the hardware instead of embracing it, and nobody wants to be on call when hardware breaks.

Every layer of abstraction is a prayer that Moore's Law will save you from your architectural decisions. At the bottom there is physics and whether you respect it.

2025's Real Innovation

Sometimes the innovation isn't in new technology. It is in remembering that computers are fast when you let them be. Game developers know this. Trading firms know this. The entire cloud ecosystem exists to help you forget it.

Five Mac Minis in a rack. Binary files mapped to memory. Thunderbolt cables for networking. This is what performance looks like in 2025. When you strip away the vendor propaganda and consultant complexity.

High performance in 2025 looks exactly like high performance always has: minimal layers, direct access, simple patterns. The only difference is now you can build it for $15K instead of $15M.

Your million-dollar Kubernetes cluster is being outperformed by techniques from Doom. Your database is being beaten by memory mapping from trading systems. Your cloud architecture is being embarrassed by Mac Minis running game server patterns.

Welcome to high performance infrastructure in 2025. It is faster, simpler, and cheaper than you've been told. Because the people who actually need speed never bought what the cloud was selling.