A true stress test - Black Friday
Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 11:51 pm
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.
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.
