Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday

Load test passed

As soon as I woke up on Thanksgiving morning, before I even had a cup of coffee, I hopped into my parents’ office to check the stats windows I left running all night. I had to look twice to be sure of what I saw. The session count in the early morning already rivaled peak time of the busiest day in a normal week. The order counts were so high that I called our DBA to verify orders were not being double-submitted. They weren’t. By noon, customers had placed as many orders as in a typical week. Page latency, our summary indicator of response time and overall site performance, was clearly stressed but still nominal. Better still, it was holding steady over time, even as the number of sessions and orders mounted. I was one happy camper over dinner. By evening, we had taken as many orders in one day as in the entire month to date. By midnight, we had taken as many orders as in the entire month of October and the site held up.