Successful Melbourne cup day
Ease of use, code reusability, and reduction in test hours
Companies brand image relies on website and mobile app usage, reliability, and performance
Multi-geo load testing managed from a single interface
Continuous development and testing process through GitHub integration

Challenge

Ensure that systems are robust enough to manage 10 times the normal load on a premium betting event.

Details

Getting ready for Melbourne cup day

Australia represents the highest per capita gambling spend in the world, with 64 percent of Australian adults estimated to participate in some form of gambling each year. As such, the betting industry is highly competitive and tightly regulated.

The Melbourne Cup takes place each November and is the highlight of the Melbourne spring racing calendar. Known as ‘the race that stops a nation’, it is a popular betting event, and a major portion of PointBet’s revenue is driven during Spring Racing Carnival season in Australia, as Pranay Agarwal, SRE & Performance Lead for PointsBet, explains: “When I tell you that it is not just this day that is so important, but that the vast majority of the bets are placed in the last 10 minutes before each race of the day, you can imagine the load on our systems during that particular time. The second busiest time is just after the race finishes, when our clients check their bet status. We absolutely cannot afford for it to fail, and so a robust and enterprise-ready performance testing solution was an essential we needed straightaway.”

OpenText Professional Performance Engineering gave us a robust performance testing framework with industry leading in-built capabilities. We found we could enter all our client activity, merge our interactions into one master performance testing scenario, and replicate from there.
Pranay Agarwal
PointsBet Australia SRE 與績效主管

Robust performance testing with OpenText Professional Performance Engineering

PointsBet has an ambitious growth strategy which includes other geographical regions. The team wanted to invest in a solution that could meet the requirements of managing different regions from a single interface. There was some experience of Open Source performance testing tooling, but when this was compared to OpenText™ Professional Performance Engineering, which Pranay had used in previous roles, it was found that creating and executing test scripts was much easier and faster: “OpenText Professional Performance Engineering gave us a robust performance testing framework with industry leading in-built capabilities. We found we could enter all our client activity, merge our interactions into one master performance testing scenario, and replicate from there. The instant feedback we receive with OpenText Professional Performance Engineering is also fantastic. Instead of waiting for a diagnostics report to complete, we can analyze the system performance in real-time and monitor the test while it is running.”

OpenText Professional Performance Engineering’s API capabilities create a comprehensive end-to-end performance testing flow, from the user logging onto the website, to selecting an event to bet on, to depositing money, reviewing past transactions, browsing custom promotions etc. The OpenText Professional Performance Engineering interface is easy and intuitive to use and does not require much training which makes onboarding new team members very easy. Integration with GitHub, used for PointsBet’s software development, ensures a continuous development and testing process, in line with DevOps principles.

We were reaching hundreds of thousands of hits per second from various channels; 10 times our normal run rate. These levels are unprecedented, but thanks to OpenText Professional Performance Engineering, no performance issues were encountered on the day at all, and our site and app performed brilliantly.
Pranay Agarwal
PointsBet Australia SRE 與績效主管

Melbourne cup day performance without a hitch

Confident in its load testing capabilities, PointsBet eagerly anticipated Melbourne Cup day which is always run on the first Tuesday of November. “We were reaching hundreds of thousands of hits per second from various channels; 10 times our normal run rate,” says Pranay. “These levels are unprecedented, but thanks to OpenText Professional Performance Engineering, no performance issues were encountered on the day at all, and our site and app performed brilliantly.”

He concludes: “We are clear that by choosing an enterprise-ready performance testing solution in OpenText Professional Performance Engineering we reap the benefits when we scale our company to include new regions. We can also see that our testers are saving many hours with the user friendly interface, giving us a very convincing return on our investment (ROI).”

About PointsBet Australia

PointsBet is an Australian founded, cutting edge online sportsbook operator successfully taking on the international players that have dominated the market in recent times. The company prides itself on having the quickest and easiest-to-use app (iOS and Android), providing the best content and experience for sports bettors. PointsBet covers hundreds of thousands of sporting events across all sports, and more than 200,000 racing events across 22 countries.