Sky TV Italia
We helped Sky Italia stabilize and optimize their Magento platform to handle massive traffic spikes and order surges before major sports events—ensuring smooth performance and high-volume sales without hardware upgrades.
Mar 2015 - Apr 2015
We supported Sky Italia, a leading digital satellite broadcaster, during a critical performance phase of their Magento platform. Faced with intense traffic spikes just before major sports events, Sky Italia needed to ensure platform stability and speed under pressure. Through a detailed performance audit, code review, and targeted optimizations, we helped their in-house team significantly improve system stability and throughput. The result: a faster, more resilient Magento store capable of handling high sales volumes during peak moments—without the need for hardware upgrades.
About the project
Sky Italia is a leading digital satellite television platform, owned by Sky Group and operating similarly to Sky UK and Sky Ireland. As one of Italy’s top sports broadcasters, the platform handles massive traffic spikes, especially in the final hours before major sporting events when customers rush to purchase subscriptions.
With such time-sensitive and high-volume transactions, the performance and reliability of their Magento-based platform were critical.
Challenge
Sky TV Italia experienced extreme spikes in web traffic and order volume, especially in the final minutes before major sports broadcasts when thousands of customers rushed to purchase last-minute subscriptions.
Their Magento platform struggled under this pressure, risking slowdowns, transaction failures, and lost revenue during the most critical sales windows. The challenge was to maximize performance and stability without increasing infrastructure costs while ensuring a seamless user experience under peak load.
Our Role
In March–April 2015, we partnered with Sky Italia’s in-house team to provide expert consulting focused on improving Magento performance under extreme load conditions.
What we've done
- 🔍 Deep performance audit of the Magento instance
- 📄 Code review and architecture evaluation for scalability and best practices
- 🧪 Load and stress testing using JMeter, simulating peak traffic during sports events
- 🔧 Recommendations for optimizing server usage and throughput without changing hardware
- 🤝 Collaboration with Sky Italia’s internal dev team to implement key improvements to optimize Magento further to serve even more clients and accept even more orders on the same hardware without any issues or faults.
Results
Following our performance audit and optimization work, Sky Italia’s Magento store became significantly more stable and scalable under extreme traffic conditions.
As a result, Sky Italia was able to:
- Serve more users simultaneously
- Process more orders in less time
- Maintain stability under pressure
- Avoid additional infrastructure costs by optimizing existing hardware
These improvements ensured the platform was ready for live, high-conversion traffic demands where every second matters.
Summary
We supported Sky Italia, a leading digital satellite broadcaster, during a critical performance phase of their Magento platform. Faced with intense traffic spikes just before major sports events, Sky Italia needed to ensure platform stability and speed under pressure.
Through a detailed performance audit, code review, and targeted optimizations, we helped their in-house team significantly improve system stability without additional costs on the same hardware. The result: a faster, more resilient Magento store capable of handling high sales volumes during peak moments without hardware upgrades.