SparkFun had a free day about a year ago, on which they gave away $100,000 in free orders (up to $100 per customer). Not surprisingly, it brought their web site to its knees in a fairly short period of time. Ostensibly part of the hidden motivation for this event was to evaluate the load-handling capabilities of their web servers. They decided to do it again today, this time giving away $150,000 (with slightly different rules) and making some donations to local charities. They also made much ado about how they’ve increased their server power by an order of magnitude (I think that’s part of what they said, anyway–I could be wrong), tuned various things, etc. I thought I’d join in the fun, just to see what happened. Here’s a chronology of what I observed:
8:57AM – the count-down banner on their site appears to be operating correctly.
9:00 – the count-down changes to “NOW” and I click it a few seconds later. Nothing happens.
9:01 – Firefox tells me that the connection was reset. Yes, it took less than 60 seconds for the site to go down this year.
9:09 – After refreshing the page every minute or so, it finally loads, sort of. Most of the graphics are missing and I can’t really tell what to do in order to attempt to claim my free credits.
9:10 – I get this error message while trying to navigate to the front page:
9:12 – Back to the usual message from Firefox about the load being too high.
9:20 – I start this blog entry, still without being able to load a page.
So, from where I’m sitting, it looks like SparkFun’s customer base–or at least people who heard about the free day–has grown faster than their server capacity.
For a moment I was bummed that I didn’t know it was happening this year. And then the reality pointed out by your post sank in, and I realized that most of what I had missed was spending my morning watching Firefox not load a page…
Last year I didn’t realize how hopeless it was, and had my hopes rather high beforehand.
It’s a sort of interesting study in what people think their time is worth. I kept trying now and then (while answering email and doing other stuff) until around 10:00, whereupon we went grocery shopping. When I got back, it was over. The topmost comment on the thread about Free Day was this:
Okay, besides the obvious point that the comment was made well before three hours after the start of the contest, and hence the guy couldn’t have actually spent three hours at it, was it really worth a maximum of $100 in credit to spend over two hours beating on his browser? Depends on how he values his time, I guess.
That said, someone I know IMed me to tell me that he was able to get in and claim his $40 history-based credit well under an hour after the start of the contest. I have a theory about why he succeeded while I failed, but I’m not going to state it here. I mean, SparkFun might do it again next year, right? 😉
And we’ll just keep that little ace up our sleeves, eh?
FWIW, I was on the #sparkfun IRC channel during the festivities and it was interesting to watch the progress – there appear to have been some serious bugs in their server setup that kept things from working smoothly for the first hour or so, but then after they patched that up the pace picked up considerably and it was all over with in about 20min.
In their wrap-up report on Friday, they put up a graph of funds distributed over time, and asked “Can you tell when the second webserver came back online?” referring to a dramatic jump in the rate reflected by the graph about an hour after the start of the contest. So yeah, apparently something wasn’t working right at first.