Case Study: KentuckyDerby.com achieves 10x website throughput with SOASTA CloudTest

SOASTA Helps KentuckyDerby.com Deliver the Greatest Two Minutes in Sports

KentuckyDerby.com, part of Churchill Downs, Inc., needed to ensure its site could withstand huge race-day traffic spikes for the Kentucky Derby and validate new caching investments. Existing internal testing tools weren’t enough to simulate real-world load, so the team turned to SOASTA and its CloudTest On-Demand load testing service.

SOASTA helped design realistic user scenarios and run distributed performance tests across four locations, nine zones, and two cloud providers, both with and without caching. The testing uncovered overloaded web servers, which CDI fixed by adding capacity and tuning load balancers. As a result, KentuckyDerby.com achieved sub-second response times, nearly 12,000 HTTP hits per second, over 100 GB transferred in an hour, and more than 10x improvement in website throughput.

KentuckyDerby.com

Eric Eatherly

Senior Director of Web Properties, Churchill Downs, Inc.