I just fired up a container on my laptop... running on kubernetes... running in a linux VM. It's lightly dynamic (no database or filesystem I/O).

While I've also got enough other stuff running that my 15 min load average is at 4 and I've got 83% RAM used ignoring buffers/caches/otherwise.

I went and grabbed a random benchmarking tool and pointed it at it with 125 concurrent connections.

Sustained an average of 13914 reqs/s. Highest latency was 53.21ms.

If there are 10,000 people online at any given time hitting the API on average once every 3 seconds (which I believe are generous numbers), you'd only be around 3.3k reqs/s, or about 24% of what my laptop could serve even before any sort of caching, CDN, or anything else.

So... if a laptop can't serve that sort of request load, it sounds more like an indictment of the site's software than anything.