Testing under pressure
At TicketCo, testing capacity isn’t a box-ticking exercise — it’s about proving to ourselves and our clients that when the pressure is at its peak, we perform.
We sat down with our CTO, Kjetil Sørtun, to talk about the latest performance testing of the TicketCo platform, why it matters, and how it shows what’s possible when you build on the shoulders of giants.
Q: Kjetil, before we get into the details, why even run a stress test when the system is already performing well in production?
“Think of it like going to the doctor for a check-up,” Kjetil says. “Most of us feel fine, but every now and then we want to know exactly how our body handles pressure — blood pressure, heart rate, the whole lot. This was the same, but for our product. We know the system performs well every day, but here we wanted to deliberately push it to the very edge of what we’ve scaled for and see what happens. We update the system every day with new features and each change can affect the performance.
The results were exactly what we wanted to see — stable, fast, and ready for even more.”
Q: What exactly did you test?
“Two things — the extremes of high demand ticket releases, and the extremes of matchday access control,” he explains.
In the first test, the team simulated a 50,000-capacity stadium selling out at high speed — over 34,000 tickets sold in a short time — with response times staying under a quarter of a second.
In the second, they replayed a real-world matchday scenario from Norway’s busiest football day, with over 60,000 turnstile scans in a single hour. Again, the system stayed rock solid.
Q: What happens when several big clubs release tickets at the same time, or when major matches across multiple countries all kick off on the same day?
“It’s important to know your customers and their needs and build a platform that supports that,” Kjetil notes. “We isolate traffic/load for each customer in the platform, so a big release for one club will not affect others. We do this on customers, territories and service functions on the platform.
This means a surge from one organiser — or even from multiple organisers in one country — doesn’t spill over and affect others. Each runs in its own lane, so to speak, so the system remains stable and responsive for everyone.”
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Q: How is the platform able to handle that kind of pressure?
“TicketCo is built on the shoulders of giants — Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud — which gives us immense robustness and scalability by design. Our architecture automatically scales when demand requires it, so the limits we hit in these tests are not fixed ceilings. We can scale higher, quickly, and safely.”
He adds that there are smart tools in place to protect performance:
- Queue-It to smooth out traffic peaks before they hit the platform.
- TicketCo Flex, the fully API-based platform used both for internal and external clients. It allows a client to integrate directly and reduce load on the main platform.
Q: Why should a ticketing manager, or their CEO, care about this?
“Because your biggest day of the season is not the day to find out your systems can’t cope,” Kjetil says. “We’ve proven that we can handle your busiest days without blinking — whether that’s a major ticket drop, a derby day, or a packed festival gate. For the people running events, that peace of mind is worth a lot. To be robust you need to have focus on it, every day.”
Q: Final takeaway?
“Scalability isn’t a marketing promise. It’s something you have to prove and deliver 24/7. We’ve done it in live production, under real conditions, and the results speak for themselves.”
Read the full technical breakdown of these tests here → Proving scalability
