Spring Lake 5 Opening

The Spring Lake 5 opened for private registration this morning.  Previous participants received an email last week giving them a special password to register for one of 7,500 spots that is open on Feb. 1 at 5:00AM for previous registrants.

This year, the Spring Lake 5 moved to RunSignUp.  We did a load test before going live and tested 8,000 registrations in under 5 minutes.  We did not hit that kind of load this morning, but over 3,000 people registered in the first 30 minutes of opening. It eventually reached the cap at about 10:45AM.

We obviously over provisioned, but users had a great reaction to the 2.25 second average end user response (under 0.2 second average server side response rate – most of the delay is int he network and browser rendering). Here are some of the interesting charts and stats:

Browser requests per minute:

Web Server response time – less than 0.2 seconds even under high load.

Browser load time averaged 2.25 seconds.

Our configuration was:

2 m3. large NGINX Load Balancers
10 m3.2xlarge Apache Web Servers
8 c3.large Memcache Sessions Servers
8 c3.large Memcache Data servers
1 RDS in High Availability mode on db.m2.xlarge
1 m1.large Read Replica database

The database server spiked initially to 12% CPU utilization before most of the data was held in cache and settled back to under 5% for the duration.  The NGINX and Web Servers stayed at below 5% utilization.  The NGINX servers were pumping about 37 MB/sec of data on the network. So, we were certainly configured too large, but were not sure how big the initial push was going to be and felt it was better to be safe since we can scale it back easily on the AWS cloud.

The following is the registration count by minute for the first 20 minutes:

| 2014-02-01 05:01                                 |        7 |
| 2014-02-01 05:02                                 |       33 |
| 2014-02-01 05:03                                 |       69 |
| 2014-02-01 05:04                                 |      111 |
| 2014-02-01 05:05                                 |      176 |
| 2014-02-01 05:06                                 |      159 |
| 2014-02-01 05:07                                 |      156 |
| 2014-02-01 05:08                                 |      167 |
| 2014-02-01 05:09                                 |      162 |
| 2014-02-01 05:10                                 |      170 |
| 2014-02-01 05:11                                 |      116 |
| 2014-02-01 05:12                                 |      114 |
| 2014-02-01 05:13                                 |      141 |
| 2014-02-01 05:14                                 |      102 |
| 2014-02-01 05:15                                 |      107 |
| 2014-02-01 05:16                                 |      121 |
| 2014-02-01 05:17                                 |      104 |
| 2014-02-01 05:18                                 |       66 |
| 2014-02-01 05:19                                 |       81 |
| 2014-02-01 05:20                                 |      101 |