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Can Your Apps Handle an 1,800 Percent Spike in Traffic?

16.03.2012
As Super Bowl XLVI approached this year, Cars.com was facing a thorny issue. For the third year in a row it was running a big-budget ad during the game. In 2010 and 2011 the high-profile ads drew huge numbers of car shoppers to its site--a definite win--but the spike also slowed performance to a crawl. This year, armed with new application performance management (APM) tools, Cars.com CTO Kayne Grau and enterprise architect Jim Houska knew things would be different.

"The first two years we did our Super Bowl campaign, we had very significant performance issues," Grau explains. "Not only the day of the game, but following."

2012 was no exception in terms of surging traffic, but this year the team managed to provide an optimal user experience for those visitors despite their huge numbers.

"Immediately following the commercial, we saw roughly an 1,800 percent spike in page views," Houska says. "As that started to die down, we were running approximately 40 percent above our normal peak workload for about three weeks."

And Cars.com is no slouch when it comes to traffic. The site averages more than 10 million car shoppers a month. However, unlike past years, this year Cars.com was able to handle the increase in traffic without a hitch.