World Wrestling Entertainment pounds traffic spikes into submission

Sports entertainment firm uses A10 solution to manage as many as 60,000 hits per second

World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) has introduced web traffic management technology to cope with phenomenal demands on its site during peak times.

WWE.com is one of the most popular websites around, and each year, for the two weeks before and after its flagship event, Wrestlemania, it is the most popular site in the world.

Earlier this year, WWE introduced a live online voting feature, which has seen the site experience the highest hit-rate of any web site outside of a testing lab during this period according to Phillip James, web operations manager at WWE. The rate of hits can reach 60,000 concurrent connections per second.

To support this extraordinary level of traffic, WWE deployed A10 Networks' AX Series traffic management solution. The solution helps enterprises maximise application availability through a scalable web application delivery platform.

The system replaces Alteon [server switches] which were at the end of their life and were not performing as the group needed them to. "We wanted to do a few more things that A10’s solutions allow,” said James.

The AX-Series had a 64-bit environment, which attracted the company because it was moving all of its hardware to 64-bit as well.

“The voting system is to be used for a couple of shows each year, when we see the stars change from one of WWE’s brands to the other, from or to SmackDown or Raw,” he explained.

“So then we would require a live vote. We would bring up a profile of a superstar and ask during the commercial break for viewers to go to WWE.com and ask whether they want the superstar to stay with the brand or to move brand.”

The sports entertainment company has also recently introduced another new use for its voting system, its invites viewers to vote for who they want to see fight.

“You would know one of the wrestlers, say for example, HHH, he would be the fixed wrestler, but who is he going to fight? You could pick John Cena, Seamus or The Undertaker,” said James.

“This facility is only available while you are on the commercial break when the site attracts between 13 and 14 million users."

In conjunction with A10’s solution, the sports entertainment company uses a user datagram protocol (UDP) application, which is a PHP front-end LAMP application; a solution stack of free, open source software, which writes to the file system.

It has also deployed a sweeper application that would truncate those files, put them in the MySQL, tabulate them and about a minute or two into the next part of the show, delivers the results to the mobile truck. The mobile truck travels to all of the venues and carries the IT infrastructure.”

The engineers in the mobile truck then announce which superstars will be fighting via the Titantron – a large flat-screen display – at the arena.

However, although the new implementation gives the sports entertainment company many more options to explore viewers’ interactions with the web site, whether the company begins to use it more frequently is out of James’ hands.

“The technology allows us to be flexible, but in terms of how often we use live voting, that's up to the scriptwriters, we don't have any influence.”