Turkey Trots 2021: Technology Makes a Difference

As we wrote last week, Turkey Trot Day 2021 was a record-breaker, with more than 617,000 registrants for the day on our platform. But it’s not just a big day for the runners: it’s a big day for GiveSignup | RunSignup technology, too. We like to keep the focus on your events and your successes, but did want to take a moment to look at how reliable, easy, and mobile-friendly technology made a difference this Thanksgiving Day.

Reliable: Handling the Turkey Trot Traffic

Those 617,000 runners don’t just run – they also come back to your GiveSignup | RunSignup race website to verify race morning logistics, register last minute, check results, and view photos. At peak time, our servers were handling 18,500 requests per minute – all without crashing or creating delays. That is up from about 12,000 pages per minute in 2019. In fact, while we added a 5th load balancer, none of our servers exceeded 25% utilization at any point during the day.

And response time actually gets faster as the system is fully loaded – mostly because of the caching mechanism we use so that once data is displayed once coming from the database, it is much faster coming from the cache on later queries. So for example, the image of a sponsor logo displayed on a website only makes that first call to the database, but is cached after that. So average response time at the server level was 65 milliseconds (.065 seconds):

Easy: Better Technology = Less Support

With 640+ races on the platform, our support team was geared up and ready for action on Thursday morning. But the flood never came – we saw just 39 support tickets on race morning.

RaceDay Scoring

RaceDay Scoring, our next generation scoring software, and The Race Director, was used by 131 timers to time 269 races on Thanksgiving morning with a total of 192,545 finishers timed by the software.

Of those 131 timers, just 3 submitted support tickets. That means 98% of timers using our scoring software soared through race morning!

Participant Support on Thanksgiving Day

While 3 of the support tickets were attributed to RaceDay Scoring, that leaves just 36 tickets between the 617,000+ runners. That’s just one support ticket for every 17,139 runners!

RaceJoy

We had more than 40 Timing Partners help 70+ races offer RaceJoy to more than 20,000 users Thanksgiving week – our app to provide participant real time GPS-based tracking, cheer sending, and real-time results. It also helps virtual events like this year’s Silicon Valley Turkey Trot be more tangible and make participants feel connected to an official race even though it was all remote. RaceJoy issued 227,000 progress alerts as participants completed their mileage. About 8,000 participants used the app along with 12,000 spectators who sent more than 32,000 cheers to their tracked participants.

Mobile Friendly: Optimized for Mobile Devices

Mobile views of race websites has increased steadily over the last decade, but on Thanksgiving Day, when families are likely to be checking their race results and photo on the go, mobile friendly sites proved even more important. A whopping 85% of page views on Thanksgiving Day came from a mobile device.

GiveSignup | RunSignup’s free race websites are always designed to be mobile-friendly, and easy mobile websites mean fewer email complaints and in-person questions for race directors and timers!

Photos!

We had 63 races us our RaceDay Photo platform to upload over 25,000 photos (for free).

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