A true stress test - Black Friday

[Robbie@FireFold]

Managed to push Able to its limits.

So we decided to go big this year at FireFold for Black Friday. We came up with some CRAZY door busters and good deals all around. The biggest was our LG 42" 1080P for $700 shipped. We only wanted to do a handful at that low price so we had limited quantity and a max of 1 per order.

I leaked the ad to a couple of forums and from there it spread like wildfire. We had people calling the week of Black Friday asking about it every 5 minutes. Lot's of mention on large large deal forums which was great for us!

So we decided to make all deals active at 12:01AM Black Friday. At 11:30 the site was already experience a slow down - I assume from people hoping to get in early. At 11:50 PM I got into Admin and was ready to pull the trigger on unlocking the items.

12:01 I let the flood gates go - and did it flood. The site became deadlocked. I was remote from home and I couldn't get the front page, admin, or anything to load. Apparently others had no issues because we started selling our 'main event' doorbuster. It sold out.. then kept selling out. I'm not sure if Able was so slowed down it wasn't able to take it out of stock. I think PayPal or Google Checkout would have part of the blame - we had quite a few Google Checkouts come in after and Able wouldn't allow it to have an order number. Then the we started getting ASP errors. Of course I was freaking out about the TV's and didn't get the errors. Something about deadlocked and passing something. I was able to stop the TV's with little damage. If we do this again we will not announce a time and remove Google/PayPal.

After 15 minutes of getting hammered the site started to come back to normal, but the orders were flowing in. Every time I refreshed(15-20 seconds) we had atleast 10-20 more orders appearing. We kept an amazing constant stream of orders flowing all night.

Kudos to Able. The site did better then I predicted with that large rush of people trying to get one item.

[compunerdy]

I have done 1 item sales before and 2 or more people will grab it at the same time. Usually only one person gets a correct looking order on the AC side while the other is for $0 or something like that. What you have to watch out for though is even though it looks like only 1 order went through they both showed up in paypal as being completed.

[Robbie@FireFold]

I have done 1 item sales before and 2 or more people will grab it at the same time. Usually only one person gets a correct looking order on the AC side while the other is for $0 or something like that. What you have to watch out for though is even though it looks like only 1 order went through they both showed up in paypal as being completed.

Yeah we had 5-10 of these. Most understood and went on about their day. Got a couple still pissed at us.

[calvis]

I leaked the ad to a couple of forums and from there it spread like wildfire.

Actually I am kind of disappointed that you didn't share it with your Able brethren.

Just kidding.

[TTMedia]

Who are you hosting with? And are you on a VPS or shared account?

[Robbie@FireFold]

Who are you hosting with? And are you on a VPS or shared account?

Self hosted with 2 brand new top of the line servers. One controlling the DB and the rest on the other.

[Robbie@FireFold]

I leaked the ad to a couple of forums and from there it spread like wildfire.

Actually I am kind of disappointed that you didn't share it with your Able brethren.

Just kidding.

Hah. Next time I'll be sure to post it up!

[AbleMods]

The biggest was our LG 42" 1080P for $700 shipped.

Imagine browsing the internet on THAT puppy

[compunerdy]

I have a comp hooked up to my 50"..one hell of a monitor