Who Broke the Internet?
Nobody told me there’d be days like these Strange days indeed. ~John Lennon, Nobody Told Me It was a strange day indeed for the Internet yesterday. If it seemed like your connection was slow or broken, it probably wasn’t your imagination. That’s because according to a post on CNN, a router glitch caused sites to go down across the Internet on Monday. Indeed, Networkworld was reporting several major networks including Comcast and Time Warner, and poor, pitiful RIM experienced issues. I know personally, while my Comcast connection didn’t break completely, I noticed...
read moreLet Target’s Issues Be a Lesson for Your Site
A week ago, Target’s web site went down for the second time in six weeks, and unlike the first time when Target was launching a big promotion, it doesn’t appear that there was a really good reason for it. According to an article on Computerworld, the company confirmed that the site went down for two and half hours last Tuesday, but company spokespeople declined to say why. It’s hard to blame them. The outage had to be embarrassing, but every company should know by now that transparency is all important in these instances. Regular readers may recall we covered the first...
read moreLoad Balancer Trips UNC Blackboard Site
Last week, the University of North Carolina Blackboard site, the one that students access for all their class information, went down while students were on break, leaving students without access to this crucial information — due to a load balancer issue taking down the site. According to an article on The Dailytarheel.com, the college’s newspaper web site, the problem happened the week of October 23rd when students were on Fall break. When they tried to access the site, instead of getting class information as they normally would, students instead encountered error...
read moreUSAJobs.gov relaunch hampered by performance issues
When you launch a high-profile site, Job One for the site’s architects should be making sure it can handle whatever traffic volume comes its way, and that’s especially true for a government jobs web site. Yet The Wall Street Journal reportsthat in the two weeks since a federal jobs web site, USAJobs.gov, relaunched it’s been hampered by performance issues. The embarrassment for the government is compounded by the fact it let Monster.com run it for a number of years without a problem. When the Feds took over, and undertook a site redesign, they obviously didn’t do...
read moreConcentrate on the Right Things to Improve Web Performance
Web monitoring pros have to take into account a lot of factors when it comes to improving web site performance, and in an interview with Steve Souders, the Velocity Conference co-chair last June on on the O’Reilly Radar blog, he suggested that many of you could be looking at the wrong part of the problem. Souders suggested that many people are looking at the back end and trying to tune the code and database queries to get the maximum performance out of it, but he says, this is a trap that many web architects fall into. He said it actually has very little impact: “We...
read moreFree Real User Monitoring
This blog is sponsored by Correlsense,
the maker of SharePath RUM Express -
a free tool that provides a real-time
view into the actual experience of
your end-user, including availability,
response times and service levels.
