Case Study: Altus Assessments achieves seamless scaling for thousands of simultaneous tests with Heroku

Altus Assessments Delivers Thousands of Data-Intensive Tests at Once on Heroku

Altus Assessments is a Toronto‑based company that delivers the CASPer online admissions test for healthcare and education programs, processing over 120,000 tests a year for 200+ institutions. The business faces extreme, predictable traffic spikes—up to ~10,000 concurrent users during test windows—and previously relied on a third‑party vendor whose provisioning delays caused lag and a poor candidate experience.

Altus migrated its customer‑facing apps to Heroku to gain direct control, scaling from a few Standard dynos to Performance dynos and tuning processes and WebSockets for real‑time throughput. The move eliminated vendor delays, allowed on‑the‑fly scaling, kept CPU usage low, reduced response times to under 50 ms, improved security and monitoring, and supported reliable growth and future plans for autoscaling and private spaces.

Altus Assessments

Rich Emrich

Co-Founder and CEO