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ITV F1 website gets in the fast lane
Case study: How the tech team got up to speed with demand for its online footage

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Friday 05 December 2008

ITV's F1 web team has been using load balancing software from Zeus Technology during the 2008 Formula One Season to cope with user demand.

At the start of the season in March, ITV's F1 website had to cope with a huge increase in traffic as it showed live footage as simulcasts.

On the Thursday before the Australian Grand Prix the ITV F1 website saw a huge rise in traffic as people came to watch live footage of the first practice session and the website struggled to cope.

Speaking to silicon.com, head of technology for ITV.com Steve White, explained the problem was partly created by an agreement to show live footage only being reached at the 11th hour.

Once the problem has been identified, something obviously needed to be done to solve the issue. As White had previous experience of working with Zeus Technology he contacted the company.

The F1 site was being hosted by a third party that only had the ability to cope with 100Mbps of traffic. Web page views alone took up 50Mbps during peak periods, so the additional bandwidth requirements of the live footage, meant a bottleneck was inevitable.

White explained: "What we ended up doing was using the ITV.com main hosting infrastructure, which is obviously huge, as the delivery platform."

Two Zeus ZXTM load balancers were installed on the ITV.com servers and the F1 content cached on to the in-house hardware.

This meant traffic coming from outside could be distributed across the infrastructure, allowing the F1 site to stand up to the huge amount of traffic.

According to White, the tech was up and running just two days later, by the end of the Friday. During testing the new setup coped with 5,000 concurrent users, showing it could stand up to the increased demand.

"Since we've had the [Zeus tech] in place, the site has coped perfectly well," White said.