93% Faster Next.js in Kubernetes

Abstract

You’ve deployed Next.js on Kubernetes. Traffic spikes hit, pods max out while others sit idle, and requests timeout. So you over-provision. Your cloud bill grows. The problem persists.

The uncomfortable truth: PM2’s cluster module and single-CPU pod scaling are broken for CPU-bound workloads like React SSR.

In this talk, we go down to the kernel. I’ll show you why the cluster module imposes ~30% overhead on every request, and why Next.js structurally *cannot* implement early 503 responses—by the time it knows it’s overloaded, requests are already queued.

Then we’ll explore SO_REUSEPORT—a Linux kernel feature available since 2013 but criminally underused in the Node.js ecosystem. It eliminates coordination overhead by letting the kernel distribute connections directly to workers.

You’ll see real AWS EKS benchmarks: 93.6% faster median latency, 99.8% reliability under sustained load. No magic. Just better architecture.