A 35,000-Seat Stadium on a Phone: What We Measured

Most tickets for a big match are bought on a phone, often a mid-range Android one, often on a weak connection. The seat map is the heaviest thing on that checkout page. If it opens slowly or stutters under a thumb, the buyer leaves before they pick a seat.

Our new film shows a stadium map at every scale, from one seat to the whole bowl and back through a laptop, a phone, and a 3D view. This post gives the numbers for the phone part.

What we measured

In July 2026 we measured a warm start end to end on a 34,476-seat stadium, from the click that opens the event to a map the buyer can use. It took 0.9 seconds.

The same test on smaller venues shows how the time grows with the data:

Fifty-five times the data costs 1.7 times the wait. The median frame rate stays at 59.9 fps at every size in this test, and zooming and panning hold 60 fps with 60,000 seats on a mid-range Android phone.

We took these numbers on our own test venues and didn’t benchmark every device. They show how the curve bends. A stadium takes less than twice as long to open as a small hall.

Where the phone breaks first

On a phone, a stadium map usually runs out of memory long before the seat count becomes a problem.

In version 1.65.12 we found that loading the background image of a 34,476-seat venue used about 700 MB of video memory, and some mobile browsers closed the page. We fixed it with Constrained GPU mode. The Renderer detects a device with a small GPU budget, loads a preview of the background at about 1,000 px, and adds detail crops of up to 2,048 px, with a 30% margin, only for the part of the venue on screen. The buyer sees the same map, and the phone keeps the page open.

How the map behaves under a thumb

The defaults are tuned for a small screen:

• Pinch zoom works between 0.5 and 2, with presets at 0.5, 1, and 2.
• Seats become selectable from zoom 0.66. Below that zoom the whole venue is in frame and the buyer moves around by section outlines. A thumb lands on a section there, because single seats are too small to see.
• A tap on a section in this overview zooms in. The host page can choose to fit the section to the screen instead.
• The Renderer draws through WebGL when the host page turns it on, and falls back to HTML5 canvas if WebGL is not available.

For the rendering side of this story, WebGL against Canvas 2D in detail, see WebGL vs Canvas 2D for Seating Chart Rendering.

Bottom line

On a phone, a stadium map has to open fast, keep its frame rate under a thumb, and fit in memory. In our tests the 34,476-seat stadium was ready in under a second and zoom held 60 fps. On devices that need it, Constrained GPU mode keeps memory in check.

To check it on your own venue and your own phone, open the Playground or book a demo.