GiveMN (www.givemn.org) launched in 2009 as a website to promote charitable giving in Minnesota. To generate excitement, GiveMN organized Give to the Max Day, a 24-hour campaign to highlight giving. That spark touched off a blast of online giving — $14 million in 24 hours. Since that trial run in 2009, Give to the Max Day has become an annual tradition, raising more money each and every year since it started. Every year thousands of organizations raise money to improve the quality of life in Minnesota and communities around the world.

Like many successful ventures, GiveMN was a victim of it’s own success. In 2013, GiveMN’s application was over-run with usage. The resulting 4-hour system outage on the biggest day of the year was very damaging to the organization.

Having a successful 2014 was critical to the survival of GiveMN. To be a success, the website needed to perform at an acceptable level, and more importantly, stay on-line throughout the 24 hours.

GiveMN engaged SWAT Solutions to help determine if the site was ready to handle the anticipated traffic and have the response time expected by the GiveMN community. Detailed information was needed such as knowing how the website would behave under peak load, where the website performance would degrade, and where it may break. They also wanted to know how the system would behave during peak load for a sustained period of time.

Details of this case study are available as a Whitepaper on our Performance Testing page.