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The Bayshore Marathon in Traverse City, MI opened this morning at 9:00AM. It is a very popular race, and there were a bunch of people ready to sign up when registration opened. And many of them signed up very, very fast – 68 in under a minute, 508 in less than 2 minutes and another […]
Yesterday, February 17, 2020, was a big day. We processed over $3.4 Million across over 50,000 registrations. There was the big 30,000 lottery drawing for the Blue Cross Broad Street Run. Also the 1,400 person drawing for the Horribly Hilly Hundreds. Oh, and there were two sellout races with the Race To Robie Creek selling […]
We have been doing a number of infrastructure updates over the past few weeks to improve availability, increase performance and assure security. For example, there was a major Amazon AWS outage on September 5 that took out the SQS queuing service for 1 hour and 40 minutes. Most other registration companies were offline, but our […]
We are in the midst of some infrastructure improvements. This is split among a variety of improvements – performance, security, maintainability, availability, and staying on the most current technology. We did a set of improvements in our caching and server connections that improved the core response time of a race page load from 140 milliseconds […]
You may have seen a new piece of data on your Dashboard Overview page – Transactions! As of Nov. 2, the data still shows $0: While it will be cool to see the real data in another day or so, for geeks, the interesting part is how we are going to show the data! If […]
Bayshore Marathon opened this morning and along with other traffic put a load of 1,000 registrations per minute on our system. Response time was 2.6 seconds with peak loads of over 6,000 pages per second. Registration opened at 9:00 and there were 861 people signed up within 2 minutes – meaning they breezed thru the […]
We had a DDOS attack on RunSignUp today. It lasted from about 4:00PM until 4:45PM when we were successful in cutting it off. It averaged over 1,000 requests per second. The attack was looking for vulnerabilities like SQL injection. This slowed down the average response time on our website about a half second from about 2.7 […]
We have begun developing our new Photo Platform for RunSignUp. There are two key pieces of new architecture that we are using as we build out this new platform, and they are cool for tech geeks. As mentioned in the 2016 Roadmap, we are developing an open platform for photos for race websites. We anticipate integrations […]
We try to improve our infrastructure in Q1 of each year to make sure we do not build up technical debt and stay on top of the most current trends in technology. We have four goals when we look at this each year: Improve Availability – reduce the chance our systems will go down, and […]
We have also done a major upgrade of the RaceJoy infrastructure on Amazon AWS – more than doubling the size of the database server and upgrading to the latest version of the database. This will mean our standard environment now handles the largest loads we have had without us having to do special upgrades over […]
We continue to do our annual big infrastructure update. Improvements to date have decreased average page load time across all devices (over 50% are mobile phones) from about 3.2 seconds to 2.85 seconds. While that does not sound like a lot, that is 980,000 seconds (11 days and 8 hours) of wait time last week […]
We have also completed an upgrade of our hardware infrastructure over the past week. This includes upgrades to our front end load balancers, our web servers and our database server (we left the memcache servers the same since they are so over-sized for their load). The hardware upgrades have resulted in an improvement of at […]
You may have noticed a speed up in the Participant Reports on your race dashboard. We did some optimizations of the queries as part of our infrastructure upgrades. We are also benefiting from the upgrade we made to the Aurora Database yesterday. The database upgrade is probably not noticeable to the human eye. Individual database […]
We did a major database upgrade to Amazon Aurora MySQL this morning (with zero downtime!). This upgrade increases performance, improves scalability, improves reliability, availability and positions RunSignUp for continued growth and change. We were one of the Beta test sites for Aurora, and were very impressed with the performance and other gains from this amazing […]
The Race to Robie Creek in Idaho has an interesting twist on handling their sell-out race – a low cost drawing. The race cap of 2,100 participants was filled in the first 10 minutes. For those who do not get into this unique, mountainous Half Marathon, there is a $5.00 drawing they leave open for 5 […]
Most people do not understand technology, which is fine. The problem is that many people translate that into not valuing technology or the complexity behind the many simple uses of the web and mobile apps they see every day. This winds up being a risk for race directors when it comes to evaluating registration systems. […]
Perhaps tempting fate writing this 2 weeks before the end of the year… We had 8 minutes of total down time in 2015. That is 99.998% uptime. The good news is that all 8 minutes were planned downtime for required system upgrades and we were able to notify users and not miss transactions: 2 Minutes […]
We have been asked by a customer to document our disaster recovery plan, and we figured that it might be useful to document this for other customers as well as provide an example to other websites who might want to use a modern approach to these topics. As with most modern apps, most of our […]
Here is a video that show what happens when a race opens and a lot of people are waiting to register quickly. The Murfreesboro Half Marathon has a cap of only 3,250 people on their beautiful course in Tennessee, so they always sell out quickly and people want to make sure they get a spot. […]
We have a cool real time map of RunSignUp activity on our website. Blue dots are the city that a race is in where some user on the Internet is checking out that race’s webpage. Yellow dots are when someone signs up for a race – we use their zipcode since we know it at […]
We have written about this before. At RunSignup this is both a cultural component as well as a technical foundation. Culturally, we seek to continuously improve. We try to develop good solutions for customers, but they are never perfect. We learn from the feedback and then make improvements. You can see this by how we […]
Boilermaker opened “Open” registration today on RunSignUp. They had opened a loyalty program last week. Things went well, as you can see from the post on the right! We always like to do an assessment of our systems and how things worked and share that publicly. The first person registered in 54 seconds – completing […]
Boilermaker, the historic 15K road race in Utica, NY, opened up a Loyalty Program registration this morning at noon. They are opening up registration only to finishers of last year’s race for a week – next weekend they will open remaining slots to everyone else. In the first 10 minutes over 1,800 people registered. 30 […]
RunSignUp calculates race cap availability upon credit card checkout. This can create frustration for those who are in the middle of registering to find out that they did not make the cut! The reason we do this is it is the most reliable mechanism to handle a sell out situation. There is a very accurate […]
The Spring Lake 5 Mile opened for the second year with us. They sold out their 12,000 slots in the first 9 hours. They opened at 5AM and has nearly 2,000 registrations in the first 6 minutes! We were monitoring our systems, and are really happy with the scalability and performance. We maintained approximately 2 […]
We have recently upped the limit to 50,000 coupons that can be copied when creating a new race with the copy feature. We also now automatically remove expired coupons, which will not count against the 50,000 limit. If your race has over 50,000 coupons, we suggest that you keep track of them in separate spreadsheets. Then […]
The Space Coast Marathon opened up registration this morning on RunSignUp. This is a sell out race, and what was interesting is the way they handled registration. Like the Spring Lake 5, they wanted to give a first chance to last year’s participants. And like the Spring Lake 5, they emailed a password to last […]
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 […]
We were recently asked if we could handle 1,000 registration in 10 minutes. Of course we can! That is why we spent so much time proving 50,000 registrations in 7 minutes. If you are a geek, read the technical white paper on scaling. We also had a real life race a few weeks back that […]
Last year we did a very large project that has made RunSignUp the most scalable and high performance registration system available. We were able to test our system registering 50,000 runners in 7 minutes (total time from first page thru credit card payment and confirmation). See technical details of our scalability project here. One of […]
As we have committed to, we do a bi-annual report on Availability of the RunSignUp Service. As previously reported, we put a lot of effort in during 2012 to create a multi-faceted approach to high availability for our customers. During the first half of 2013 we only screwed up badly once. This was due […]
I am really, really upset today. It would be very, very simple for race directors and registration companies give RunSignUp a call to do load testing before they go live. We offer this as a service to any race – you don’t need to use us! “We offer this as a Testing Service as […]
As anyone who uses RunSignUp knows, we are rapidly innovating – just take a look at this blog. There are several secrets to our fast cycle time – great developers, limited scope and focus just on the running market, wonderful customers who give us amazing feedback, and a software infrastructure that is built for fast […]
We had a problem with one of our load balancers in the middle of the night from a bit after midnight until about 1AM. Two cool things: 1. No users noticed it since there are at least two in service at any time. 2. Our monitoring software was able to detect it and fix it […]
We are growing very fast thanks to all of the great word of mouth we are receiving from race directors, timers and clubs that use us. Our challenge is to make sure we can handle the growth. Fortunately we have been involved with several companies in the past and we’ve been paying attention to several […]
RunSignUp completes Scalability Project. Demonstrates registering 50,000 runners in 7 Minutes and 120,000 Results Lookups per Minute. Creates new offering for Large Races. Moorestown, NJ – January 21, 2013 – RunSignUp, the leading innovator of online tools for Races and Running Clubs, today announced record performance for registration and result searches at the ChronoTrack Conference […]
We covered a number of promotional ideas for races in this video: Promotion Ideas for the New Year Age-Based Pricing Group-based Pricing Coupons Discounts Gift Certificates Virtual Race Bags Facebook & Social Media Email •50,000 Registrations in 7 Minutes •100,000 Results per Minute
50,000 Registrations in 7 Minutes! Your race probably does not need to sign that many people up that quickly, but all of our customers are going to benefit from theScalability and Availability project we have recently concluded. We were motivated as runners because of race websites that are unresponsive during registration, or after big races trying […]
Our Scalability project has reached success! We have eclipsed our goal of doing 50,000 registrations in 10 minutes – completing the task in only 7 minutes. This means RunSignUp is simply the most scalable registration system in the world – able to meet the needs of the largest races. And combined with our robust Participant […]
We still have a lot of work to do, but the progress so far is really good. We have a great test suite designed where we can deploy any number of test servers to emulate any number of runners registering for a race. We can also deploy any number of webservers to handle the load. […]
We have recently done a number of upgrades to our infrastructure to try to improve our service. As discussed in an earlier blog, we are trying to be transparent on how we operate. One of the biggest things that worries us about providing our service is what happens if it goes down when our customers […]
We recently did a major upgrade of our management and monitoring tools to use New Relic. It provides us a number of things: Monitoring & Alerting. We had been depending on our own simple scripts for this. This now monitors the site every 1 minute and alerts us if there is a problem. SLA. We […]
We have started working on the scalability of RunSignUp. This is a major project for us this summer, building on our move to the Cloud from this past winter. We have implemented a bunch of caching and other performance optimizations over the past couple of months. Users have been seeing this in increasingly fast page […]
