Case Study: BBC News achieves real-time audience insights at scale with MySQL

BBC News Website uses MySQL to Monitor Reader Interest

BBC News, serving 35 million unique users and over 800 million page impressions a month, needed a real-time way to show which stories readers were engaging with. The challenge was to deliver a dynamic, low-latency reporting system that could handle very high traffic while keeping costs down.

BBC built the in-house "BBC News Live Stats" on an open-source stack (Apache, Linux, MySQL), using a separate content network with load balancers, four Apache web servers, Java application boxes that sample one in seven users, geo‑IP lookups, and MySQL for storage. The system produces near real-time charts (≈10 second delay), offers regional and hourly views, handles millions of rows and roughly 30,000 inserts per minute, uses MyISAM merge tables and replication for performance, and minimized costs by relying on open-source software so the primary outlay was hardware.

BBC News