I think when you run meteor --production
, you are still running as if you are in development-mode, only using "production" settings and such. You are still getting an internal/local MongoDB, you are still burning CPU time monitoring files, etc.
If this is true, then the end result is that you will not scale at all. I doubt that running local MongoDB uses optlog, which is a HUGE performance boost for Meteor apps.
Your best bet would be to look at some automated build/deploy tools. I have personally used mup and mupx. The latest version of mup builds your app, sets up MongoDB (if you want) and nginx, builds them all as docker images, and deploys them. You can even setup SSL certs w/ nginx (although no Let's Encrypt support yet :(). Or, you could easily script the deployment yourself using any number of tools, including just raw scripts. I think in the long run you will be in much better shape than trying to run the app using the meteor command.