Every August, hundreds of thousands of students log in to UCAS to find out where their futures lie. It is the most intense day on the UK higher education calendar, and for twelve consecutive years, Drupal has been at the heart of it. Students apply through UCAS months ahead and receive offers that depend on their final exam grades. A-level results (exams at age 18) are released to everyone at the same moment, early in the morning. Students without a place find universities with vacancies and secure a course, often within hours.
This year, at the peak of results day, the UCAS platform served roughly 560 requests per second, about half of them POSTs. It handled almost a million logins and over a million applicant dashboard views, and response times stayed flat while traffic surged. The outcome our team hoped for was the one we got: a day so uneventful - "A complete success".
This talk looks at what made that possible from the Drupal side. We'll cover how a twelve-year-old Drupal project has evolved, how Drupal works alongside Node and APIs to handle search, display, login and transactions, how the team planned for a single day of the year, and the lessons any Drupal team can apply to its own high-stakes moments.
Key takeaways
- Drupal has a twelve-year record of supporting a critical, peak-load public service.
- Plan for the spike: about half of peak load was POST traffic, and the platform still held flat response times.
- Boring is built, not lucky: long-term partnership, planning and monitoring make the biggest days uneventful.
- A platform can modernise and still be trusted on its highest-stakes day.
This is a real-world case study of Drupal supporting a critical national service, with measured results from a single high-stakes day.