Database and Cron Disasters: Performance Lessons from Scaling a Monolith to 1M Lines

When monolithic architectures exceed 1 million lines of code, seemingly minor database queries and background processes become critical performance bottlenecks. This real-world account from MorphMarket reveals overlooked culprits—pagination counting, long-running cron jobs, and memory pressure—that can degrade system performance by half, along with pragmatic solutions applicable across Django, Rails, Laravel, and similar frameworks.