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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."
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.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
...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*
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).