A couple days ago we reported midway through the much-hyped Cyber Monday that most sites were doing fine, but that Kohl’s was having serious trouble. Now that all the traffic has mostly died down, we wanted to take a final look at how the sites did.
First, the big winner of Cyber Monday was without a doubt Amazon. According to Hitwise, prior to Cyber Monday Amazon had already received more than 15% of the market share of online shoppers. And while this is by far the largest share (the next closest was Walmart, with half the visitor share), Amazon’s servers had no trouble keeping up with the load, as evidenced by our monitoring service:
This shouldn’t surprise anyone: Amazon is so massive and so good at scale, they practically created a brand new market (Cloud Computing) by selling their technology and infrastructure in the form of Amazon Web Services, the very same stuff BrowserMob is built on top of.
Unfortunately, not everyone else fared as well. Kohl’s faced continuous performance problems all weekend and throughout the day on Monday. In fact, while the errors and massive performance problems had dissipated by Tuesday morning, performance had leveled out to 50% higher than it was prior to Cyber Monday, indicating that Kohl’s is still battling performance demons:
Note that these are hourly averages, and that the red dots indicate that there was one or more error detected on the Kohl’s home page during that hour. For an example of such an error (and, unfortunately, lost revenue opportunity), check out our post on Kohl’s from a few days ago.
In terms of uptime/availability, we counted eight full blown failures over a 14 hour period, which translates to a 4.76% downtime. Actual loss of revenue was probably even higher as some customers likely became frustrated and abandoned the site for other retailers. After all, according to a new report by Akamai and Forrester, two seconds is the new threshold for how long shoppers will wait around. If you’re curious how you stack up, run an instant test right now.
Unfortunately, Kohl’s wasn’t the only one to be crushed under a stampede of holiday shoppers: Borders also suffered. While the performance didn’t spike nearly as high, Borders too faced almost a 2X decay in response time and sixteen outright failures during the same time period:
Besides the fact that Borders was effectively down almost 10% of the time we measured, the most noteworthy part of this story was Borders’ failure to gracefully fail. While every website operator hopes to be able to handle all the traffic that comes it’s way, every site will ultimately fail – even Amazon. How you fail will determine if your customers have confidence in your business.
For example, when Kohl’s experienced too much traffic, they were able to place a cute message indicating that they were trying to keep up with the load:
While the ~5% of visitors who experienced this page probably were disappointed, they were almost certainly less disappointed than the ~10% of visitors who experienced this from the Borders website:
So while we of course always recommend load testing as a way to prepare for expected surges in traffic, it’s also a good idea to push that load beyond the limits to see if your systems fail gracefully, like Kohl’s was able to. If not, you might just leave your customers confused and frustrated.
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