Quentin Paquot
- Introduction
This is a question that mainly comes from major broadcasters & radio groups willing to launch “second screen” campaigns.
Qualifio’s infrastructure is not built to handle high peaks of traffic on very limited time periods like specific second-screen platforms. Qualifio is built for data collection campaigns running on a longer timeframe.
Qualifio is a mutualised platform: the infrastructure is shared by all our customers across Europe. More information can be found in our IT & Security Documentation available on request via your Customer Success Managers.
“Concurrent users” is theoretically very hard to measure as it’s an arbitrary metric: it depends on how it’s defined.
Concrete case
50,000 concurrent users performing requests every 3 seconds in a Qualifio quiz is an entirely different beast than 50,000 concurrent users reading a static article for 5 minutes.
In this example, the work to provide is 100 times higher for Qualifio campaigns although the number of concurrent users is the same (the hardware needed is at best proportional). 50,000 users on the same article at the same time will perform 1 server request: 50,000 in total. In a Qualifio swiper, users will answer every 3 seconds approximately, for 5 minutes: 5*20*50,000 = 5,000,000 server requests.
The number of concurrent users Qualifio can handle also depends on the campaign:
- How long it takes to complete participation (campaign type, number of questions, etc.)
- What features are activated in a campaign (Single sign-on integration, multimedia usage, upload of 10MB pictures, etc.)
- Whether there's one pageview per question or all the questions are on the same page.
- Etc.
For this reason, we can’t provide any concurrent users number without activity statistics, idle statistics (time between user interactions; does the user contact the server every second, 10 seconds, minutes, 5 minutes, etc.) and more information about the campaign and the business concept behind it.
If we take the concurrent users (active users) definition of Google Analytics, they are speaking of 20 minutes.
In that case, we're able to handle maximum (after 20 minutes steady rate) something like 20 minutes * 60 seconds * 20 users per seconds = 24,000 concurrent users. But this metric is useless as it doesn’t take into account peaks and lows in those 20 minutes –it’s a theoretical approach.
If we need to handle 36,000 participations in 30 minutes, at a constant rate, we’ll have 1,200 participations per minute and we’ll be fine.
The same amount in 5 minutes with:
- Minute 1: 6,000
- Minute 2: 14,000
- Minute 3: 8,000
- Minute 4: 1,000
- Minute 5: 1,000
- Total in 5 minutes: 30,000
We can’t provide any insurance the platform will handle the peak without user-facing errors.
Conclusion
Based on this, this is the standard peak of traffic accepted on Qualifio campaigns:
- Participation per second: 15-30
- Participation per minute: 900-1,800
Qualifio is not built to be used as specific second screen campaigns and should not be used as it.
Please contact our support team when you expect high peaks of traffic on your campaigns –and provide us with business details and expected traffic. We’ll be able to advise you.
And what about caching?
Most of the first pages of Qualifio campaigns are cached. It’s important for editorial polls/quizzes published on the first page of big media groups. Yet as soon as the visitor interacts with a Qualifio campaign, the second screen and all the following ones are personalised with scores, variables, points, profiles, data to prefill the form, etc. Each participant might have a different experience. It is therefore not possible to cache all those pages.