Gone in 178 seconds

The Royal Enfield Classic Pegasus is a limited edition variant of the popular Classic motorcycle series. Inspired by motorcycles used by parachute troops during World War II, this model was put into production with only 1000 units to be made available worldwide, 250 of which were to go on sale in India through a flash sale, on a first-come, first-serve basis.

The Flash Sale

While this wasn’t the first instance of a flash sale being carried out by 22feet Tribal Worldwide, the sale of this particular model brought with it a unique set of obstacles to overcome. Users were allowed to register for the sale for the period of 41 days, each receiving a unique reference number. More than 15000 users signed up within this period, each hoping to get their hands on a unique Classic Pegasus.

Extra Muscle

Since the sale would be following a flash format wherein all users who intended to make a purchase would actively be vying against each other and in real time, systems needed to be beefed up to accommodate 5000+ requests concurrently. Loader.io was used to generate virtual traffic to understand the stability of the architecture. During the course of this process, several tweaks and refinements were made to the server and the load balancer was optimized for the expected number of user sessions. A brand new sale page was built, optimized to load the site in less than three seconds, with a maximum page load of 150 kb. 

Smooth sale-ing

At 4 PM, on the day of the sale, the Classic Pegasus went live with ~3000 requests to the server taking place simultaneously. Thanks to foresight, planning and beefed-up architecture, and the sale went through without a hitch: all 250 transactions were completed in under 178 seconds.