As happens every year in February, the new offers from the Stadtjugendausschuss are made available for purchase. One slight difference this year was that only the top seller (Karlopolis) was bookable; the other new vacation activities will be offered one week later.
Last year, approximately 5,000 visitors tried to reserve their desired vacation spots almost simultaneously (the offers were released at 6:00 PM), which overwhelmed the servers for a while. After forty-five minutes and boosted performance, all orders were successfully processed.
Lessons were learned from those mistakes, however. Consequently, the following measures were implemented this year:
- Product pages were made cacheable; information regarding whether spots are still available is loaded asynchronously via Ajax.
- A queue was integrated into the ordering process: WooCommerce no longer attempts to process incoming orders immediately. Instead, after clicking “Order now,” they are placed in a queue and sent for processing in “batches of 30.” Only then are the orders converted into reservations and customers receive a confirmation email. This function allows the load to be significantly throttled when nearly 2,000 people attempt to book Karlopolis activities simultaneously at exactly 6:00 PM.
Naturally, system performance was also scaled up for the sales day, to approximately ten times that of a normal business day.
Do you want to offer a vacation program online? The vacation platform is in use in Karlsruhe and Mannheim. More about the vacation platform for municipalities
