Handling High-Volume Webhooks Reliably

Webhooks are the glue of the modern internet. But what happens when one of your customers goes viral on Hacker News and receives 500 form submissions per second?

If you naively try to dispatch 500 webhooks per second to their CRM, you will likely crash their server, or your own.

Queues and Backoff

At Rinnode, we use Upstash Redis as a high-throughput queue. When a submission comes in, the webhook job is pushed to the queue instantly.

Our background workers process the queue. If a webhook delivery fails (e.g. the destination server returns a 500), we implement an Exponential Backoff strategy.

We retry after 1 minute, then 5 minutes, then 15, then 60. This ensures maximum delivery reliability without overloading struggling endpoints.