Case Study: Mavericks Invitational handles 10,000 RPS and 1M peak viewers with Fastly

Mavericks Invitational - Customer Case Study

The Body Glove Mavericks Invitational is a high‑profile big‑wave surf contest that live‑streams to a global audience from mavericksinvitational.com. Hosted on a shared WordPress environment and run by a small engineering team, the site typically saw ~10 RPS but needed to scale on short notice (about 48 hours) to handle spikes above 10,000 RPS during the event while keeping live scores, wave updates and merchandise sales running smoothly.

Using Fastly’s WordPress plugin, Instant Purge, Origin Shielding and API‑driven configuration, the team cached both static and dynamic content (including wave updates and sponsor assets), made near‑instant cache purges and protected the origin from traffic bursts. The result: the site supported about 1 million peak viewers over a 7‑hour contest, hit peaks of ~10,000 RPS without origin overload, achieved a 99.9% cache hit rate and delivered sub‑millisecond TTFB for a fast, reliable viewer experience.

Mavericks Invitational

Jeff Clark

Contest Director