A developer built a multiplayer website called One Million Chessboards featuring 1 million simultaneously playable chessboards where moves are reflected for all users in real time. The backend runs on a single Go server with the board stored fully in-memory as a 2D array of 64 million uint64s. Key technical highlights include a single writer thread with mutex coordination, zstd-compressed protobufs over WebSockets, zone-based client grouping for efficient update delivery, and a ~1,600-line optimistic move application system with rollback logic. Within 8 hours of launch, players made 1.3 million moves with ~400 concurrent users and negligible server load.
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