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Web Traffic Snarls Sites on Black Friday
eweekhickins writes "A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macys and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. In fact, almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance."
Sears was responsive enough, not much in slowdowns. However, once you put something into your cart, it wouldn't allow you to remove it... had to delete cookies to get a new cart.
Akamai is great but it doesn't help shopping carts or processing. Its only good for offloading the static bits (gifs, js, css, flash, etc.). It helps but still not the big win. (Full disclosure - my company http://hostedlabs.com/ is in this space and I know a thing or two about how hard this is)
Mods missed the point, all 3 of the sites listed in the article appear to be using Apache or similar on the front page. IIS is more often associated with IT meltdown and security breaches (Monster.com, etc).
And the author misses some important info. The front page loads OK, but search and payments are slow. Its not the web servers that are the problem, but the backend database and transaction systems. These are going to be stuff like DB2 on IBM mainframes, high-end Oracle systems, or 3rd party transaction processing systems (like Visa and Mastercard).
Its just the web equivalent of the wait I had at the petrol station last week. It took 2 tries and 2 minutes to get my card accepted and debited. Not the stations fault, its just that every Visa payment goes via Basingstoke, and if Basingstoke is busy everyone has to wait.
More interestingly, www.newegg.com runs IIS and the front page is still loading slowly.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.