Case Study: RTÉ achieves tenfold traffic scalability and resilient performance during spikes with Varnish Software

Varnish Api & Web Acceleration, An Essential Part Of Rté’s Toolkit

Ireland’s national public service broadcaster, RTÉ, faced scaling and reliability problems with its web platform while using Squid as a reverse proxy. Frequent site redevelopments and unpredictable traffic spikes—especially during news and sports events—led to performance degradation and occasional crashes, and each Squid server could only handle roughly 800 requests per second before slowing.

RTÉ deployed Varnish Cache Plus and Varnish Custom Statistics (VCS), which delivered much faster response times, higher availability and easier troubleshooting. The broadcaster now serves at least ten times more traffic on the same number of servers, has “flatlined” server load, quickly diagnosed and fixed tricky XHR misconfigurations with VCS, and is planning expanded real‑time monitoring and streaming optimizations—resulting in better performance and significant cost savings.

RTÉ

John Moylan

Senior Systems Administrator