Why 5% of Your Webhooks Are Failing (And You Don't Know It)

You integrated Stripe in dev. It worked perfectly. You pushed to production. It worked perfectly. Then, Black Friday hit, and your database missed 500 orders. What happened?

The "Thundering Herd" Problem

When you connect a webhook provider (like Stripe or Shopify) directly to your application server, you are making a dangerous assumption: My server can process requests as fast as Stripe can send them.

This works fine when you have 1 order per minute. But what happens when a bulk operation triggers 5,000 events in 3 seconds?

Your server creates a database connection for every incoming request. When the spike hits, your database connection pool fills up. The 51st request gets rejected. Stripe sees a 500 Error and marks the delivery as failed.

Why Native Retries Aren't Enough

"But wait," you say. "Stripe has automatic retries!"

Yes, they do. But they follow a strict schedule. If your server is down for maintenance or overwhelmed for 30 minutes, Stripe might exhaust its retry attempts (usually 3 to 5 times) and then silently drop the event.

Once an event is dropped, it's gone. Unless you have a team manually reconciling logs against Stripe's API every day, you just lost revenue.

The Solution: Asynchronous Buffering

The fix is to decouple the Ingestion from the Processing.

• Ingestion Layer: A high-throughput API that does nothing but receive the webhook, save it to a queue (like Redis or SQS), and return 200 OK instantly.
• Worker Layer: A separate process that pulls jobs from the queue at a manageable pace (e.g., 50 per second) and updates your database.

This is exactly how we built WebHookGuard.

Implementing a Buffer with Node.js

If you want to build this yourself, here is the basic logic using Redis:

// 1. The Receiver (Very Fast)
app.post('/webhooks', async (req, res) => {
  // Push to Redis Queue instantly
  await redis.lpush('stripe_events', JSON.stringify(req.body));
  
  // Tell Stripe we got it. Don't process it yet!
  res.status(200).send('Buffered');
});

// 2. The Worker (Controlled Pace)
async function processQueue() {
  const event = await redis.rpop('stripe_events');
  if (event) {
    try {
      await updateDatabase(JSON.parse(event));
    } catch (e) {
      // Handle retry logic manually here...
    }
  }
}

Or, Don't Build It at All

Building a queuing system requires managing Redis, setting up DLQs (Dead Letter Queues), and monitoring uptime.

WebHookGuard acts as this buffering layer for you. We give you a unique URL to paste into Stripe. We capture every event, buffer it, and forward it to your server at a rate you define.