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Web Traffic Snarls Sites on Black Friday

Posted by Zonk on from the hit-em-hard-then-pick-them-up dept.

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."

36 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Sears.com was hit by compwizrd · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Sears.com was hit by Datamonstar · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's a feature. Good way to FORCE a shopper to buy something. In the brick & mortar store I used to work at we used krazy glue.

      --
      The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
    2. Re:Sears.com was hit by origamy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I was online at around 5.50am(PST) when Sears.com died. I was opening a new page to view the details of one product and that new page would not show up. Sears.com would also not work in a new page. Shortly after 6am I was able to get back into the site, only to see the prices had gone up!

  2. Why... by kungfujesus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why don't these huge stores buy servers that can take the strain? sure, they may be ridiculously overpowered for most of the year, but being able to function on black friday is extremely important for their bottom line.

    1. Re:Why... by snl2587 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Money

    2. Re:Why... by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How do you know they didn't have huge servers - just not huge enough? (Ditto for bandwidth, etc...)
       
      Seriously, predicting traffic is pretty much a black art. Even if you build out for what you thought would be enough, you still could get caught flatfooted.

    3. Re:Why... by interiot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And why don't the brick-and-mortars open up at midnight, with 3 times the normal cash registers open? Because the near riot is good for business when it gets covered in the local news. There's a reason that each store stocks 12 units of the best deal, and most of the other prices are just normal sale prices... that generates an aura of crazed shopping, and a line of 200 people who are willing to stand hours in the cold -- 188 of whom will be buying products at a profit.

    4. Re:Why... by BosstonesOwn · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's retail they don't spend before it happens , they try and save a buck when they can.

      My experience at a retail business was exactly that. We had to have weeks of slow networks and servers in order to get the ok to get vendors in to bid on selling us gear. It was a huge joke.

      They should host with companies like akimai who can provide bandwidth on demand.

      --
      This package Does Not Contain a Winner
    5. Re:Why... by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Seriously, predicting traffic is pretty much a black art. Even if you build out for what you thought would be enough, you still could get caught flatfooted.

      Hear Hear! This man speaks wisdom!

      A year ago, I purchased a number of 1u 4-way servers in anticipation of rising demand. Based on rough guess of processing speed and current workload, I made an estimate of how long these servers would handle the load.

      Now, a year has gone by, and the load has only risen slightly, despite a dramatic increase in traffic! Bandwidth has risen sharply, yet the server load still floats at around 3-5% all day long, while based on my past estimates, would should be routinely hitting 25% and spiking to 200% from time to time.

      It's rare that it ever hits 20%. But disk usage is out through the roof - now at about 3x initial guess. Our customers are USING THE CRAP out of our services, but apparently refinements in the software over the past year (caching, etc) have all but completely negated any performance hit from the increased load.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    6. Re:Why... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Posting anonymously since I'm too close to this...

      I've worked with all of the companies mentioned at one time or another. Some do better planning than others. Quite simply, Black Friday represents a worst-case-scenario for an ecommerce site. Either you build out enough extra capacity to handle it (and we're not talking a couple servers here - we'd be talking more like hundreds of servers, not to mention massive database backends) and pay for it (both hardware, management, bandwidth, storage, etc), or you don't build out any extra and get slammed. Tens of millions of dollars of equipment and management, all for one day. Or what most companies do - you build out enough to handle the brunt of it, make as much profit as you can, and some peaks you just don't handle because it's not worth the massive investment to handle 100% of the traffic. It's a cost-benefit analysis, plain and simple. I can't comment in too much detail, but some of the companies listed did exactly this, and some... well, let's just say they didn't invest nearly enough. That's their choice.

      (Please recall that a OnDemand type of initiatives don't handle this - the idea behind them is there is extra capacity that you "switch on" on a moment's notice to handle a spike. The problem is that there's no capacity when everyone is hit at the same time. OnDemand is great if your peak is at a time when someone else's isn't - they get extra capacity at that time (for instance, flowers and greeting card companies on holidays, retailers on Black Friday). Here, everyone needs capacity at the exact same time. It's simply brutal.)

      It will be an interesting week as we get more data on Black Friday and everyone filters back in from Thanksgiving (mind you, many of us were working all this weekend, and some serious overtime monitoring and improving the situation however we could).

    7. Re:Why... by SeaFox · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why don't these huge stores buy servers that can take the strain?

      I used to work for the Dept of Education (by way of a subcontractor) and the site I supported (the one your submit you government college financial aid form through) had the same problem. Several times a year it would slow to a crawl or not really be usable at all. The days this happened were the days that states required forms be filed by to be eligible. Despite the fact there are 365 days in a year, it seemed there were only a dozen or so days that states would choose as their deadline days, so we'd always have at least a few states all due on the same day.

      Anyway, the question you just asked used to come up a lot. "Why don't they just buy more servers/capacity?" The answer is because the difference in traffic is so huge between these days and "normal" days it would simply cost too much to maintain that sort of capacity. And (in our case at least) the security required for the app and data keeps a temporary bandwidth solution from being viable solution.

      Note: in the case of the FAFSA, it was ultimately the users themselves who were at fault for the slowdown, it not like an 18-hour shopping sale where you have to be there in a small time window, the form was available year round, it just happens that most people wait till the [i]last possible day[/i] to do it, then complain about the traffic jam (I'm looking at you, California!).
    8. Re:Why... by cskrat · · Score: 2, Insightful
      The answer is simple. The people that ultimately decide what gets purchased are businessmen and not engineers. As such they will try to exactly hit the minimum required amount of equipment to handle the situation. Unfortunately they will also use a naive method of determining that minimum, i.e. they may look at the number of sales transactions for the last couple years on that day and then use that information to project a number of 'visitors' to have the IT department prepare for.

      The network manager, if they're any good, will, however, think in terms of peak page requests and database transactions per minute, how to minimize cross-server requests and how to tweak site assets to minimize bandwidth requirements. Unfortunately the data that he presents to the people that control the spending accounts will not be in line with what they already presume to know based on the last 5 years of sales data. At this point, either the network manager needs to know how to be a salesman or the VP that he reports to needs to trust his people to know what they were hired to know. If both conditions fail then the site is doomed on Black Friday. If either condition holds true then either the web site will be prepared to the network manager's recommendation or, and this is more likely, the following decision process will be followed.

      Where X = Money spent on preparation
      And Y(X) = Margin dollars earned in sales after spending X on preparation
      Maximize Y(X)-X
      Like I said, simple.

      Of course every company has a sort of corporate personality. Many of which will tend to throw more people at a problem rather than invest in equipment for the existing people to use. If you can see this happening in their stores then you can be sure that they're doing it in their web department as well. Unfortunately the best that such a practice can hope to accomplish is speeding up recovery time from equipment failures. Many companies are also completely clueless in terms of technology so they may just be doomed from the start. As an anecdotal example for the latter case, I work for a company whose website uses several cross server assets per page. This works fine from an external browser but causes several firewall password prompts per page from any of our in store terminals.
      --
      My God! It's full of eval()'s.
    9. Re:Why... by aussie_a · · Score: 2, Funny

      Seriously, predicting traffic is pretty much a black art. So should we burn practisers or hire them in order to reach fill the quota?
    10. Re:Why... by jrexilius · · Score: 2, Informative

      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)

  3. O RLY? by Pinckney · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who would have guessed that tens of thousands of people trying to use a website all at once would cause it to slow down?

    1. Re:O RLY? by Kingrames · · Score: 5, Funny

      They should give that effect some sort of catchy name.

      --
      If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
  4. VS down? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Would someone please think of the panties!

    Seriously though, I'll be really pissed if my S.O. tried to order some for herself and couldn't.

    captcha: populate
    heh

  5. victoriassecret.com is ok. by WK2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    victoriassecret.com was working fine last time I checked. For research.

    --
    Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
  6. compare to physical stores by Lehk228 · · Score: 4, Funny

    as compared to the physical locations which were just as fast as normal and didn't have long waits while shopping.....

    --
    Snowden and Manning are heroes.
  7. The term "Black Friday" by popo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is it just me, or is the term "Black Friday" being used much more this year than in previous years? Maybe I'm the only clueless one, but I was seeing it so much I Wiki'd it for a little explanation: the root of the term (and if this is well known to all, my apologies... I'm slow that way) is that the balance sheets of retailers are typically "in the black" by the Friday following Thanksgiving.

    I can't help thinking it sounds more like a stock market crash than a "good thing".

    --
    ------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
    1. Re:The term "Black Friday" by forkazoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Is it just me, or is the term "Black Friday" being used much more this year than in previous years? Maybe I'm the only clueless one, but I was seeing it so much I Wiki'd it for a little explanation: the root of the term (and if this is well known to all, my apologies... I'm slow that way) is that the balance sheets of retailers are typically "in the black" by the Friday following Thanksgiving.


      Apparently, Black Friday is extremely well known, even internationally. I passingly know a fellow who grew up in Germany and moved to the US this year, and was very excited about his first chance to see Black Friday shopping in person after having heard so much about it. Seeing Americans in a consumerism frenzy must be a bit like watching sharks in a feeding frenzy, I guess.
    2. Re:The term "Black Friday" by UserChrisCanter4 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Please read the wiki again; the root of the term is the high stress caused to transportation workers. The first citation anyone can find refers to the traffic snarls and the associated headaches for traffic police, cab/bus drivers, etc.

      As the wiki points out (and common sense will tell you), bleeding money for 11 months of the year and hoping to recoup it in the last one is one of the most asinine business plans since the "???->profit" joke. Similarly, the wiki points out that quarterly SEC filings from any decent retailer will show you that they do make a profit in the other quarters, as well.

      Unless you're a Christmas decoration specialty retailer or something similar, waiting until the fourth Friday in November to turn a profit would be a recipe for failure.

    3. Re:The term "Black Friday" by bladesjester · · Score: 2, Funny

      I went shopping on Black Friday a few years ago. My general comment has been that I will only do it again if I'm armed. Those people are freaking crazy. It's like a bunch of rabid Tasmanian devils...

      --
      Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
  8. Consumer patience may vary... by flabbergast · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Consumers might also be more patient with a graphic-intensive site that has images they truly want to see. Victoria's Secret, for example, experienced a huge slowdown Thursday night--from a 5-second response to a 15-second response--but White speculated that its customers might be more tolerant of delays because they're expecting a more graphic-intensive experience, and the delay is thus worth waiting through."

    Right, I tolerated the delays because VS is simply "graphic-intensive". Uh-huh... yeah, that's it.

  9. You're not the only one by Moraelin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If it makes you feel any better, you're not the only one. Any other application of "black" to a day seems to have meanings a lot more... well, dark.

    E.g., "Black Tuesday" is when the Great Depression hit.

    Heck, even "Black Friday", other than that particular meaning, was applied to massacres, riots, major financial scandals, you get the idea.

    So I can't help wonder what kind of idiot chose "Black Friday" to mean "we're selling lots of stuff". I mean, gee, it must be such a dark and depressing thing.

    More importantly, it's the kind of language that obscures instead of informing. For someone who doesn't know that particular pun already, it evokes the exact opposite image. I'll confess that I too, when reading that summary, was left thinking, basically, that it was some great catastrophe that befell them.

    On second thought, though, heh, it sounds like what marketers and management tend to do to sound smart... when they aren't. Now I'm not saying that all of them are clueless, far from it. Just that you can often tell the ones who _are_, by the inclination to speak gobbledygook and think that having a buzzword for everything makes them so great.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  10. Re:blame by shawn443 · · Score: 4, Funny

    my moderation luck sucks lately. hasn't been this bad since I wrote a javascript is awesome post.

  11. Black Friday? by nick_davison · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...with Lowe's, Macys and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. Black Friday has nothing to do with it. I like to "research" what I would buy a hypothetical girlfriend, should I have one, every Friday. The only difference was that I had all of this Friday free.

    Uh, I mean, that's what I imagine some theoretical person might have been doing.

    Look! A beowulf cluster! *runs*
  12. Re:Last year... by Datamonstar · · Score: 4, Funny

    My old Everquest guild had one of those first Monday every month. Let's just say I didn't get too much questing done them days, knowwhudIUmean?

    --
    The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
  13. Re:Ted Stevens by Rebelgecko · · Score: 4, Funny

    Actually, senators are surprisingly affordable, especially compared to a plumber.

    --
    CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
  14. Re:The term "Black Friday" vs. Black Sabbath by xPsi · · Score: 3, Funny

    Is it just me, or is the term "Black Friday" being used much more this year than in previous years? Maybe I'm the only clueless one, but I was seeing it so much I Wiki'd it for a little explanation: the root of the term (and if this is well known to all, my apologies... I'm slow that way) is that the balance sheets of retailers are typically "in the black" by the Friday following Thanksgiving.

    I can't help thinking it sounds more like a stock market crash than a "good thing".

    Definitely puts Black Sabbath in a whole new light for me. So much for the "70s cool evil schtick", they were just making a financial statement.
    --
    i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
  15. Why not offer a simpler version by cerberusss · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When the peak hits, why don't e-commerce sites switch to a simpler interface? The gazillion queries that these sites do for one page can be completely switched off. For instance, I'd rather be able to put a book in my shopping cart WITHOUT stuff like:
    - "people who bought this article, also bought"
    - Full text search
    - Customer reviews
    - Editorial review
    - Offers "Buy together with hacksaw, 15% off"

    And the gazillion datamining queries done by the website.

    --
    8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
    1. Re:Why not offer a simpler version by BigDogCH · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Excellent point. I had trouble loading newegg all weekend...where normally it is really fast. Their site already has a built in option for a high or low bandwidth version of their site.......why couldn't they just force everyone to the low version (I am assuming this would save bandwidth and server load, less queries). Yeah sure, it would be missing some fancy tools, and some flash (darn), but it seems far better than turning customers away. I wonder how many $ a site like Newegg lost for each minute of downtime this weekend.

    2. Re:Why not offer a simpler version by danbert8 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is an excellent point. Companies just keep sticking more fancy looking crap on their websites leaving bandwidth unchanged.
       
      My university did this with the registration website. The added flash and java to make it look cool, except when registration time hit, all that load brought the registration server to its knees. When many students weren't able to register for several days after their allotted time, the system was reverted to the plain ol' html interface it was before. When will websites realize that just because your public has the bandwidth, doesn't mean they need to use it?

      --
      Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
  16. Re:blame by ErroneousBee · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.
  17. Re:Ted Stevens by stonecypher · · Score: 2, Funny

    Compared to plumbers, it's surprisingly affordable to have elves visit from the future to build you a robot from solid gold bars.

    --
    StoneCypher is Full of BS
  18. Papal Election by zoward · · Score: 2, Funny
    When the peak hits, why don't e-commerce sites switch to a simpler interface?



    My favorite example of this: when the pope died, and the College of Cardinals met to vote on the new pope. Once the white smoke emerged from the Sistine Chapel chimney (indicating that the ballots had been burned and a new pope elected), the Vatican web site got HAMMERED. I looked, and then looked back a little later, and instead of seeing the web site, I only saw two words at the top of the screen:


    It's Ratzinger.


    Now that's a simplified interface.

    --
    "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"