My First Holiday Load Test

Launching a store online

My client had launched a new online store in the summer. The weeks and months following launch proved, time and time again, why launching a new site is like having a baby. We expected certain things such as being awakened in the middle of the night and routinely uncovering a problem. Still, for all the problems we experienced following the launch, we approached the holiday season with cautious optimism.

Estimations for the site

Our optimism was rooted in several factors. First, we had nearly doubled the number of servers in production. Second, we had hard data showing that the site was stable at current loads. A few burst events (mispriced items, mainly) had given us some traffic spikes to measure. The spikes were large enough to see where page latency started to climb, so we had a good feel for what level of load would cause the site to bog down.