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How Glastonbury 2019 Ticket Sales Broke the Ticketing Website_870x220

Glastonbury's festival sold out so quickly it broke the ticketing website. Fans may fight through a bad experience to get an exclusive ticket - but most business can't afford to let this happen to them. This is why load testing is so important.

The Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts, founded in 1970, is one of the largest open-air music and performing arts festival in the world. The festival is mostly known for its contemporary music, but also features dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret and many other arts.

In 2017 they sold more than 150,000 tickets, then in 2018 it took a break. This year fans were dying to get their hands on a Glastonbury 2019 ticket.

On October 7, standard tickets went on sale and the event sold out in around 37 minutes, with a record number of people trying to get a ticket. Unfortunately, many of them reported the ticketing website denying service and crashing during their attempts to make a booking.

You may say this is not such a big deal for a music festival which at the end of the day gets sold out. Maybe so, but if the website creators didn’t think of the “high load” issue in advance in this case, they may not think of it in other cases either. While Glastonbury’s fans don’t have the luxury of getting a ticket elsewhere, your customers probably do have many more options to shop, from and a website failure can have a devastating effect on your revenue.

So, how we can avoid this situation? A healthy number of automated tests that cover the main functionality of your web app is a must to provide adequate and quality service in the long term. But when it comes to downtime, most people don’t consider excessive load as its source, but it’s very possible that it is.

Load testing is a type of non-functional testing which is conducted to verify the behavior of an application, website or server when subject to both normal and extreme load conditions. So, you can start your load test with a small number of virtual users and scale up until you find the limit that your site can handle. Then work with your team to increase these limits if needed. The most important thing is that by having proper test automation in place, you are prepared for any application changes, and regression bugs or performance decreases will be detected on time.

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With Test Studio you can easily and very quickly craft UI, functional, Load and Performance automated tests and integrate them in your CI/CD pipeline to find defects earlier and to ship quality applications across web, mobile and desktop. Feel free to take a look at our recent blog posts on how to customize load tests and take advantage of dynamic targets.

If you want to try it, you can start a free, fully functional 30-day trial:

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iliyan panchev
About the Author

Iliyan Panchev

Iliyan is a Senior Product Manager at Progress, responsible for the Telerik testing solutions, including Test Studio and JustMock. In the mid ’00s, he started his career in software development as a game tester because he loves video games, and eventually he realized that breaking software is fun. He believes that a good Quality Assurance Engineer should be involved in all phases of the software development process. Iliyan, now as a Product Manager, has a new objective—to relieve the QA engineer of the challenges associated with test automation and help them have more pleasant and rewarding workdays.

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