Using our own browser-based monitoring service, we’ve been watching some of the top retailers this morning to see how they fare during the Cyber Monday onslaught as US shoppers return to work after the Thanksgiving holiday. Of the sites that we’ve been monitoring, very few have had any problems so far.

While Amazon, Kmart, Macy’s, Walmart, and Best Buy all experienced minor site performance problems, only Kohls so far as outright failed. Starting around 7AM PST their home page response time went from 2.5 seconds to, in some cases, over 25 seconds (a 10X slowdown). At one point it was completely offline.

We were recently delighted to see a detailed writeup about optimizing WordPress by Rob Havasy, a blogger by night and business analyst by day. He’s been running his WordPress-powered blog since May 2009 and everything had been going quite nicely until recently:

But I noticed a sudden decrease in performance earlier this week and couldn’t understand why. I was having both resource issues on the server (PHP was consuming too much processor capacity and my host automatically killing the process occasionally) and an overall slowness on the pages. How would I track down what was going on?

We often have customers ask us why their site appeared to slow down significantly, despite the fact that their CPU, RAM, and disk utilization did not rise in utilization significantly. While those three metrics are often good indicators of why systems can “slow down”, there are many other causes of performance problems. Today, we’re going to discuss one common root cause for slow websites that often gets overlooked: connection management.

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