Web Traffic Snarls Sites on Black Friday 105
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.com was hit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sears.com was hit (Score:5, Funny)
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Funny, I tried to get to the Sears website from my iPhone on Saturday morning (probably about 10:30 or 10:45 Central time, but I'm not exactly sure), and it was inaccessible. I had no trouble reaching other sites (Slashdot, CNN). I kept trying for about five or six minutes and I couldn't get the front page to load. It got as far as the redirect off the main URL and then failed to load the following URL. I have no way to know whether they actually had site problems or some critical backbone router went d
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Why... (Score:2, Interesting)
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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.
Re:Why... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Funny :) (Score:1)
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My Large Retailer friends had problems on Black Friday, despite a ton of new hardware and extensive load testing. What they found was that
Re:Why... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why... (Score:4, Interesting)
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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Re:Why... (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Why not offer a simpler version (Score:5, Interesting)
- "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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Re:Why not offer a simpler version (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Papal Election (Score:3, Funny)
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 s
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In terms of server capacity, though, you can buy servers with additional CPU and memory which are not activated. Both Sun and IBM have programs where you buy a server with unlicensed CPUs and/or memory. If you need additional capacity down the line, they'll happily sell you either temporary or permanent licenses for the unlicensed CPUs and/or memory. Personally, I have more experience with this from the IBM side.
Does i
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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 da
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The network manager, if th
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Re:Last year... (Score:5, Funny)
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O RLY? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Funny)
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I propose "Pickleweasel" as a name for that effect...
VS down? (Score:2, Funny)
Seriously though, I'll be really pissed if my S.O. tried to order some for herself and couldn't.
captcha: populate
heh
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More pissed than if she tried to order some for you and couldn't?
Seriously though, I don't know about you, but I kind of like it when your S.O. goes ALL naked down there...
Ted Stevens (Score:1)
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Re:Ted Stevens (Score:4, Funny)
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victoriassecret.com is ok. (Score:5, Funny)
blame (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:blame (Score:5, Funny)
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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 p
compare to physical stores (Score:5, Funny)
The term "Black Friday" (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't help thinking it sounds more like a stock market crash than a "good thing".
Re:The term "Black Friday" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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You could go back with a laser on your head (going off the previous comment).
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It's internationally known
Re:The term "Black Friday" (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Yeap. You're right.
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You're not the only one (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Ink colors (Score:2)
Red Tuesday? ;) (Score:2)
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What made Black Tuesday unique was that the losses affected hundreds of thousands of non-profesional investors. Black Tuesday was named by people who had probably never even seen a ledger or spreadsheet. Different group of people use different words.
Had the losses been restricted to a smaller group of professional investors, it probably would have been named 'Red Tuesday'.
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So perhaps that's where the phrase "making a killing" comes in? ;-)
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qz
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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.
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My understanding of the origin is that for most of the year, businesses are slightly in the red (where red represents a negative number in accounting) from costs, and the spur of sales (both discount and normal) on that Friday puts the retailers into the "black" (or positive) cash.
I'm not a business owner, so I have no idea if this is the way it actua
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It's being hyped by retail interests; that's why you're hearing about it more. They're mainly doing this with traditional advertising (ad spots, mailers, etc), but media coverage can be said to be a component of that. While the 10 o'clock news is not an advertisement in the sense that an infomercial is, the news is sponsored by adverts and thus those same retailers. Thus, the media has a vested interest in trying to get people out to the malls.
Of course, the reason that retailers want to get people out to
Re:The term "Black Friday" vs. Black Sabbath (Score:4, Funny)
I can't help thinking it sounds more like a stock market crash than a "good thing".
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30-day return policies (Score:2)
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(if there's one thing I can't stand, it's shopping on a busy day)
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It's black for whoever works that day because it's the first day after thanksgiving that everyone except retail workers have off, and actually have a chance to do christmas shopping.
It's mutated alot through the years.
Consumer patience may vary... (Score:3, Funny)
Right, I tolerated the delays because VS is simply "graphic-intensive". Uh-huh... yeah, that's it.
Black Friday? (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, I mean, that's what I imagine some theoretical person might have been doing.
Look! A beowulf cluster! *runs*
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There is no excuse... (Score:2)
As usual, the CEO's, and upper management, will receive huge bonuses and the rest will suffer.
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From upper management's perspective there are dozens of great ideas - some will boost the brand, some will help fill niches that competitors are festering in, some will cement loyalty, some will increase appreciation by best customers, grow the number of best customers, decrease churn, reactivate customers, grow the customer base, provide additional channels for purchase, shift horizontally, shift vertically, decrease long term overheads, increase flexibility
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And while I agree about IT why projects fail, how do you get the competence necessary to ensure project success? The number of skilled senior IT manages I have met is
Nondelivery (Score:1)
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