The first time the national league kicked off on SportSphere, we were nervous. Load tests predicted we'd be fine. But load tests never quite capture the unpredictability of real human behaviour at scale.
Opening Day Traffic Pattern
We expected gradual traffic build-up from 6PM as fans checked the fixtures. Instead, traffic spiked 800% at 7:45PM — fifteen minutes before the first match kicked off — as every mobile app user opened the app simultaneously.
Our auto-scaling configuration had a 4-minute warm-up time. Those 4 minutes were brutal. P99 latency hit 8 seconds. Our status page wasn't even deployed at that point.