ITV Online Service Overloaded at KO of England Football Match

On 29^th March England soccer fans were looking forward to watching the big game on ITV, and tried to log in to the hub.

But…

And before long upset users were taking to social media, to vent their frustration.

Some of the more technical ones were clever enough to work out the problem.

“Service Unavailable: Back end server is at capacity”, looking very much like overloaded authorisation servers,

Yet ITV’s technology controller gave AWS this case study in which he stated that, ”We don’t need to size for the peak”:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/itv/

A big peak is not unusual in the modern business world.

These days this is a very common scenario – a big day when demand is much higher than normal. Sporting events are commonly like this and not just from spectators – there is major demand on gambling sites for the events like the Grand National, that require effective capacity planning if the service is to cope with demand. And it’s not just sporting events – many retailers fail to meet the demand on Black Friday, leading to upset customers and millions in lost profits.

And if a sports fan misses his match despite paying, he will not be quick to forgive…

So what can go wrong in cases like this? Does a service like AWS really mean you don’t have to worry about performance or capacity?

What can go wrong?

Here at Capacitas we have lots of experience in helping our customers handle extreme peak demand, and maximising the number of happy customers. Here are some common problems that are not covered by a scalable platform.

• Can it scale fast enough? If the referee is blowing his whistle, you will not have time to deploy more hardware, even if it is virtualised. Good planning is essential.
• Does your software scale? In many cases we have seen that the limit on capacity is in the software, not in the hardware. So throwing hardware, (and money), at a capacity issue is often ineffective, as well as expensive.
• Do you understand where the limits are in your IT platform, and how high they are? At what level of orders should you get nervous?
• Is the amount of processing power you can deploy really effectively unlimited? And what about your budget – none of this comes for free.
• Are you sure your software has no performance bugs? If there is something like a looping process, extra capacity will be no help at all, and the bad code will just loop faster.

For these reasons, (and others), Capacitas strongly recommend that you should prepare well in advance.

Recommendations - don't let this happen to you!

Conduct thorough performance assurance. Fixing problems at the development stage is 10 times cheaper than once they are live.

Conduct load testing. Capacitas are experts at safely testing your services on the actual production hardware, to help you understand your true capacity, and help you raise it.

If you would like to learn more about our Prepare for Peak and Performance testing solutions, please click below, to see our latest Ebook.