By Editorial Team, reviewed by Editorial Team (approved by site owner) · Published · 1 min read
Betting traffic is not smooth. A final, a derby or a tournament opener can send many times the usual load within minutes, usually just when downtime costs the most.
Know your shape
Start from your own data. When do peaks happen, how fast do they ramp, and which actions dominate: browsing, placing bets, logging in, depositing? Plan for the busiest action, not the average request.
Separate the read path from the write path
Most traffic is people looking at odds. Serve prices and market lists from caches and replicas, and keep the bet-placement path small and protected. A flood of page views should never slow down bet acceptance.
Cache with care
Short-lived caches for odds and static data cut load a lot, but stale prices are a risk. Decide per data type how stale is acceptable, and make sure bet acceptance always checks the current price.
Use queues for what can wait
Emails, reports, bonus calculations and analytics do not need to finish in the request. Move them to queues so the critical path stays fast.
Degrade gracefully
Decide in advance what you will switch off under pressure: heavy widgets, history pages, non-essential features. A reduced but working site is better than a full but failing one.
Test before the event
- Load test with realistic behaviour, including logins and bets, not only page views.
- Test the dependencies too: payment providers, odds feeds and game providers have limits of their own.
- Rehearse failover, and confirm monitoring and alerts actually reach someone.
Prepare the humans
Agree who watches the dashboards, who can make a call to suspend a market or disable a feature, and how you will communicate with customers. Most event-day problems are decided by how clearly the team can act.
Numbers depend entirely on your architecture and traffic, so measure rather than copy someone else's targets.
