I gave this talk at several occasions (meet ups, conferences, …). There are some blog posts on that topic as well over at https://stormforger.com/blog/2014/05/27/load-testing-an-interactive-tv-show-with-over-1-million-users. Checkout https://stormforger.com if you are interested in doing load testing yourself.
Abstract:
This is a battle story talk about how we helped to debug and load test the interactive German TV quiz show on ARD back in 2014. The show failed during the first 5 minutes on the first episode. The talk will outline some background info, architecture and what happened, why it failed and what we did in order to help fixing it in one week. In the end the broadcaster (ARD) demanded external load tests to verify that the optimized/fixed system could sustain 1M concurrently active players…