Facilita web testing solution helps ensure Glastonbury Festival 2005’s ticketing system could support over 10,000 concurrent users
Facilita, one of the UK’s leading providers of cost-effective enterprise-level IT testing solutions, played a key role in testing that the ticketing system for this year’s Glastonbury Festival – which starts today – was capable of handling over 10,000 concurrent users. Facilita’s partner, Majestic Interactive, was responsible for ensuring that the online ticket sales infrastructure for the festival performed smoothly – a key requirement given that no other single event generates such short-term demand as fans rush to purchase tickets from the 112,000 made available for the three-day music extravaganza.
For Glastonbury Festival 2005, Majestic focused on improving and optimising the solution, building a high capacity, resilient and exhaustively tested online ticketing system. Specific improvements included increasing the capacity of the application and hardware by over 100-fold, and increasing the number and performance of the servers by adopting Dell Xeon servers throughout the system. Majestic then selected Facilita’s powerful forecastweb solution to test the Glastonbury ticketing web infrastructure, and ensure that its Dell server systems could adequately manage expected loads and patterns of use.
“With an event such as Glastonbury, it’s essential that fans are able to get online and secure their tickets irrespective of how many others are trying to do the same thing. Thanks to our forecastweb web testing solution, Majestic could be 100 per cent confident that the system they built could handle over 10,000 concurrent users, and that the solution was resilient enough to manage anticipated traffic volumes,” commented Facilita’s Sales and Marketing Director, Colin Slight.
“The experience with Glastonbury Festival ticket sales shows how vital it is to perform proper load and performance testing prior to a system going live. Our load testing tool has again proven itself in a tough and demanding project.”
Tickets for Glastonbury 2005 sold out in record time when they went on sale on April 3 at 9am. In the two hours that it took to sell the tickets, over £13 million worth of transactions went through a system that took approximately 21 million hits, with actual traffic on the day exceeding 40,000 concurrent users (measured by site analytics tool IIS Logs).
“forecastweb gave us the confidence that the system we built would be successful on the day,” added Jeremy Gidlow, Business Systems Manager for Majestic Interactive. “Testing is a crucial element of any system, and Majestic chose Facilita based on their expertise and flexibility.”
Facilita’s powerful forecastweb solution helps organisations to test their web infrastructure and ensure that their systems can adequately manage expected loads and patterns of use. Forecastweb can handle highly complex and dynamic web site testing using easily maintainable scripts to create rich test scenarios. It is part of Facilita’s integrated suite of enterprise performance and load testing solutions that are used to test the performance and scalability of major IT systems.
