Load Testing: What It Is and How It Helps Your Business

Top Gun: Maverick made $160.5 million domestically in its opening weekend

Top Gun: Maverick broke box office records this past May after it made $160.5 million domestically over Memorial Day weekend. For exhibitors, numbers like these are an especially promising start to the summer blockbuster season. But capitalizing on blockbuster sales demands reliable ticketing services that can withstand box office breaking traffic.

If the average ticket price in the U.S. is $12.09, that would mean Top Gun sold an average of 3.4 million tickets each day that weekend. Without an ironclad platform, cinema operators run the risk of losing out on sales when their ticketing service and website run too slowly — or even worse — crash.

“Not only did the crash let many Marvel fans down, it inadvertently aided their competitors in the process.”

It’s always important to make sure you can count on your tools to scale, especially for opening weekends like these. At Boxoffice, we ensure each new version of our Boost Ticketing platform is ready to scale by performing a process called load testing.

But what exactly is load testing? Load testing is the process of placing demand on a system to test its responsiveness to said demand. We simulate this demand by creating a usage model based on the amount of people who purchased tickets for a popular film on its opening weekend and run a test to see how well the system responds when that amount of imaginary people attempts to purchase tickets at the same time.

Response time averaged out to 10–15 seconds during a recent Boxoffice Company load test. It’s a substantially low average, considering the platform has to communicate with several point-of-sale systems for thousands of requests at once.

The last thing an exhibitor needs is a platform crash when tickets for a highly anticipated title go on sale. Unfortunately, that’s what happened last November just days before the opening of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Within minutes of tickets going on sale, platforms for AMC, Regal, and Fandango crashed after struggling to keep up with high demand. Not only did the crash let many Marvel fans down, it inadvertently aided the companies’ competitors in the process.

Thanks to the load testing processes we’ve implemented, our products have been able to withstand the sort of heavy traffic that coincides with blockbuster releases.

We load test our products approximately every two weeks. We’ve also optimized our process to be as efficient as possible by live testing during dormant periods and focusing solely on the important endpoints rather than the full end-to-end journey. In other words, we test the point at which two software programs communicate with each other which allows us to catch any potential bugs earlier when we roll out upgrades.

More importantly, we’ve set our platforms to automatically calibrate their power in proportion to the traffic they receive so that each API and function will scale up when purchase requests are high and scale back down as they subside. In addition to this, we prepare exhibitors for high traffic events, like significant ticket embargo releases, by scaling up resources so that, no matter how many customers are purchasing from their theater at once, they can be sure moviegoers will have received tickets for especially anticipated films, like Avatar: The Way of Water.

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