When FOX Sports hit streaming performance issues and rising infrastructure costs during high-traffic events like the Super Bowl, X-Team helped them cut cloud costs and dramatically increase the traffic their streaming services could handle.
The ChallengeStreaming under Super Bowl load
The Super Bowl broke all streaming records as more Americans watched live across a variety of devices instead of on their TVs, posing new challenges for broadcasters' streaming services. FOX faced significant streaming performance issues, including server crashes and high infrastructure costs.
FOX Sports needed a solution to optimize both performance and cost efficiency, enabling the platform to handle higher traffic volumes while keeping infrastructure costs manageable.
The SolutionMigration to Go and tooling
- Node.js to Go migration moved key services to a more efficient language for handling high volumes of traffic.
- Specialized developer toolkit with NewRelic, Splunk, and InfluxDB integrations plus default middleware and configuration management to help services scale.
- Disaster recovery service to identify overloaded streaming channels and seamlessly reroute users to alternative streaming providers.
- Decisioning service to direct new viewers to the best streaming path and CDN based on their IP address, balancing traffic across multiple CDNs.
- Distributed ConfigTool service to run A/B tests and experiments, such as validating that the decisioning service reduced load on individual CDNs.
By migrating critical services to Go and implementing a suite of innovative tools, FOX Sports improved performance, reduced infrastructure costs, and enhanced the overall viewer experience.The FOX Sports Engagement — X-Team
The ResultsLower cost, higher scale
FOX Sports' Node.js services had struggled under 30,000 requests per second, with server CPUs crashing and restarting under the load. After migrating to Go, the new services consistently maintained just 12% CPU usage and 20MB of RAM under the same high request load.
More efficient resource utilization meant FOX Sports needed fewer resources to handle peak traffic, lowering operational costs during high-demand events, while the disaster recovery, decisioning, and ConfigTool services kept CDN traffic balanced and the viewer experience smooth.
The stack behind the build
Backend & APIs
- Go
- Node.js
Tooling & Process
- NewRelic
- Splunk
- InfluxDB
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