Havas Digital Prague supports 40,000 people for just 30 seconds

The project was to code Milan's website concept and designs as the e-commerce solution offered GAS's full range of popular fashion outlet for FREE for a duration of 30 seconds. Gas jeans are so popular we had to build a platform that which could hold up to 1 million people all frantically shopping online. The participants had just 30 seconds to find their clothing items(s) and check out their shopping cart to win.

A lot of careful planning went into the solution as a tremendous level of traffic was expected. The site needed to handle itself in a specific way, while the services it depended upon (Hosting, Database, CDN, etc.) needed to support the traffic onslaught as well. The web app also had to handle all this whilst remaining functional.

For testing, people at both Heroku and Redis monitored their services for the duration of each event to make sure the service was powerful enough to support the campaign when experiencing a massive spike in traffic over such a short period of time.

We held 3 scheduled events in Hungary, Italy and Europe. The largest digital event (Italy) saw 40,000+ consecutive users on the site, who generated hundreds of thousands Database requests per second. The website and the services depended on reliability. In addition, the hundred or so users on the site before the event had to be taken into account. The traffic hit instantaneously due to the media and PR promotion strategies that drove traffic to the site.

Havas Digital Prague were contacted by the service providers at Redis who would like to make a showcase of the event and solutions with the agency's cooperation.

We are currently planning the next leg of the campaign for Japan, India, and Russia.