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Getting ready for Melbourne cup day

Australia represents the highest per capita gambling spend in the world, with 64 percent of Australian adults estimated to participate in some form of gambling each year. As such, the betting industry is highly competitive and tightly regulated.

The Melbourne Cup takes place each November and is the highlight of the Melbourne spring racing calendar. Known as ‘the race that stops a nation’, it is a popular betting event, and a major portion of PointBet’s revenue is driven during Spring Racing Carnival season in Australia, as Pranay Agarwal, SRE & Performance Lead for PointsBet, explains: “When I tell you that it is not just this day that is so important, but that the vast majority of the bets are placed in the last 10 minutes before each race of the day, you can imagine the load on our systems during that particular time. The second busiest time is just after the race finishes, when our clients check their bet status. We absolutely cannot afford for it to fail, and so a robust and enterprise-ready performance testing solution was an essential we needed straightaway.”

LoadRunner professional gave us a robust performance testing framework with industry leading in-built capabilities. We found we could enter all our client activity, merge our interactions into one master performance testing scenario, and replicate from there.

Robust performance testing with LoadRunner professional

PointsBet has an ambitious growth strategy which includes other geographical regions. The team wanted to invest in a solution that could meet the requirements of managing different regions from a single interface. There was some experience of Open Source performance testing tooling, but when this was compared to LoadRunner Professional, which Pranay had used in previous roles, it was found that creating and executing test scripts was much easier and faster: “LoadRunner Professional gave us a robust performance testing framework with industry leading in-built capabilities. We found we could enter all our client activity, merge our interactions into one master performance testing scenario, and replicate from there. The instant feedback we receive with LoadRunner professional is also fantastic. Instead of waiting for a diagnostics report to complete, we can analyze the system performance in real-time and monitor the test while it is running.”

LoadRunner Professional’s API capabilities create a comprehensive end-to-end performance testing flow, from the user logging onto the website, to selecting an event to bet on, to depositing money, reviewing past transactions, browsing custom promotions etc. The LoadRunner Professional interface is easy and intuitive to use and does not require much training which makes onboarding new team members very easy. Integration with GitHub, used for PointsBet’s software development, ensures a continuous development and testing process, in line with DevOps principles.

We were reaching hundreds of thousands of hits per second from various channels; 10 times our normal run rate. These levels are unprecedented, but thanks to LoadRunner Professional, no performance issues were encountered on the day at all, and our site and app performed brilliantly.

Melbourne cup day performance without a hitch

Confident in its load testing capabilities, PointsBet eagerly anticipated Melbourne Cup day which is always run on the first Tuesday of November. “We were reaching hundreds of thousands of hits per second from various channels; 10 times our normal run rate,” says Pranay. “These levels are unprecedented, but thanks to LoadRunner Professional, no performance issues were encountered on the day at all, and our site and app performed brilliantly.”

He concludes: “We are clear that by choosing an enterprise-ready performance testing solution in LoadRunner Professional we reap the benefits when we scale our company to include new regions. We can also see that our testers are saving many hours with the user friendly interface, giving us a very convincing return on our investment (ROI).”