News Site Load Testing
The Daily Uptime
Client
The Daily Uptime — a national news outlet with 2M daily visitors.
Challenge
Preparing for election night coverage expecting 10x normal traffic. Previous high-traffic events resulted in 502 errors and 30+ minutes of downtime. Editorial team needed confidence the infrastructure could handle the spike.
What We Did
- Developed k6 load test scripts modeling realistic user journeys (homepage → article → live results page)
- Established baseline metrics at normal traffic (200 concurrent users)
- Ran progressive spike tests: 500, 1000, 2500, 5000 concurrent users
- Identified database connection pooling as primary bottleneck at 1,200+ VUs
- Tuned MySQL connection pool and added Redis object cache
- Implemented CDN edge caching for static article pages
- Final validation run: sustained 5,000 VUs for 30 minutes
Results
- Sustained 5,000 concurrent users
- p95 response time: under 400ms
- Zero downtime during live election night event
- 3 critical bottlenecks identified and resolved pre-launch
- Database query time: 340ms → 45ms (avg)
“Election night used to mean all-hands-on-deck praying the servers held. This year we watched 5,000 concurrent users hit the site and our biggest problem was the coffee running out.”
Marcus Webb, CTO, The Daily Uptime
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