{"id":1637,"date":"2011-01-13T08:25:56","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T16:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/13\/sparkfuns-annual-server-stress-test"},"modified":"2011-01-13T08:25:56","modified_gmt":"2011-01-13T16:25:56","slug":"sparkfuns-annual-server-stress-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/13\/sparkfuns-annual-server-stress-test","title":{"rendered":"SparkFun’s Annual Server Stress-Test"},"content":{"rendered":"

SparkFun<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

8:57AM – the count-down banner on their site appears to be operating correctly.<\/p>\n

9:00 – the count-down changes to “NOW” and I click it a few seconds later. Nothing happens.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

9:10 – I get this error message while trying to navigate to the front page:<\/p>\n

\"Image\"<\/p>\n

9:12 – Back to the usual message from Firefox about the load being too high.<\/p>\n

9:20 – I start this blog entry, still without being able to load a page.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… Continue reading SparkFun’s Annual Server Stress-Test<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}