Case Study: Royal Opera House achieves smooth, reliable ticket sales during peak traffic spikes with BlazeMeter

How the Royal Opera House Deals with Massive Traffic Spikes Every Performance Season

The Royal Opera House in London, home to The Royal Opera and The Royal Ballet, faces huge, predictable traffic spikes during seasonal ticket releases—peaking around 3,000 concurrent users as patrons rush to reserve seats. Their ticketing system, originally built for box offices rather than large-scale web demand, must handle complex user behaviors (multiple refreshes, mobile and counter sales, holds and cancellations) while protecting roughly £35–40m a year in online ticket revenue.

To address this, ROH adopted BlazeMeter for load testing and New Relic for APM, running staged tests (200 → 500 → 1,000 → 3,000 → 5,000 users) 1–2 times per year and after each infrastructure upgrade to simulate real purchase flows. The practice uncovers bottlenecks before sales days, reduces stress for ops and dev teams, ensures customer service targets are met, and delivers consistently smooth ticket purchasing with greater confidence in releases.

Royal Opera House

Phil Latham

Head of Digital Development