When will retailers learn? When will marketing departments going to consider the technical ramifications on their campaigns and launches? When will the IT department escalate performance engineering to a high priority? When will we stop reading about sites crashing under heavy volumes of traffic?

Hopefully never! Because these stories are great examples why you need LoadStorm.

Target Inc.'s website crashed yesterday due to special promotion. Apparently, the discount retailer has cut an exclusive arrangement with an Italian luxury designer called Missoni, and it would seem that the online sale of Missoni knitwear generated enough buyers to bring the site down.

I sure would like to know how many concurrent users killed it. Wonder how many requests per second the Target site was handling with less than a 5 second response time?

Can there really be more than a few hundred knitwear aficionados that would hold Missoni goods in such high esteem? What are the odds that those few hundred would all be anxiously awaiting the online sale and access the site simultaneously?

Perhaps it was 5,000 or 50,000. The result is the same - lost revenue, bad press, unhappy customers, and brand devaluation.

Not load testing is costly. Load testing with LoadStorm is inexpensive. Hmmm...is that cliche or catchy? Should I use that as a tag line? What do you think?