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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.
Who would have guessed that tens of thousands of people trying to use a website all at once would cause it to slow down?
victoriassecret.com was working fine last time I checked. For research.
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as compared to the physical locations which were just as fast as normal and didn't have long waits while shopping.....
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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".
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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.
"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.
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.
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my moderation luck sucks lately. hasn't been this bad since I wrote a javascript is awesome post.
...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.
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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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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).
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
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.
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