Scalability
July 8, 2008 – 10:20 amToday I would like to talk about scalability. In online scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.
Simply, scalability is a web server’s ability to maintain a site’s availability, reliability, and performance as the amount of simultaneous web traffic, or load, hitting the Web server increases.
Now im not one who usually criticises anything Apple does but on Monday the 7th July scalibility was obviously a big problem.
After receiving the text that the new iPhone could be ordered online i jumped at the chance to pre order as I sat down at work. However, there was a problem………. the rest of the world decided to jump at the chance also prompting O2’s website to send users round in circles. Round and round I went on the O2 merry go round.
After attempting to fill in the online form 10 times are finally decided to give up and get some work done, i was then alerted by a friend that he had been trying since 8:30 that morning.
This is a classic case of proper planning prevents piss ass performances. O2 obviously underestimated the demand for the iPhones and did not have the scalability in their back end to handle such huge demands.
Hey, maybe this was part of the plan, that 1 in 100 visitors will get through………………………………. the whole thing could of even been a massive PR stunt, nevetherless customer expectations still need to be managed.
