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outage

Storm Hits Amazon & Affects LoadStorm

Posted Sat, 06/30/2012 - 3:30pm by Scott Price

load testing tool outage - storm in VirginiaLoadStorm provides the lowest cost load testing tool by efficiently using cloud computing resources. In 2008, we launched our service based on the Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud. It has been very good for us. Rarely have we had any reliability issues.

However, the US-East-1 region (Virginia data center) for AWS got hit by a storm (not LoadStorm) last night. They lost power for about 30 minutes which caused extended outage for our load testing tool as well as other well-known services includng Netflix, Heroku, Pinterest, and Instagram.

It is frustrating to us to experience any downtime, but I guess we are in good company. The data center outage was the result a powerful electrical storm struck the Washington, D.C. area, leaving as many as 1.5 million residents without power.


Where was the generator power?

Apparently it didn't work correctly to prevent the servers from going without power. Hmmm....sounds like the engineering was inadequate. I know that type of equipment is expensive, but we are talking about one of the largest and most advance data centers on the planet. There is no excuse. In the words of James T. Kirk in his scrap with Khan, "We got caught with our britches down." Maybe the AWS engineers need to take the Kobayashi Maru test.

What's worse is that customers were affected for more than 30 minutes as Amazon worked to recover virtual machine instances. “We can confirm that a large number of instances in a single Availability Zone have lost power due to electrical storms in the area,” Amazon reported at 8:30 pm Pacific time. Shortly after that message they said “power has been restored to the impacted Availability Zone and we are working to bring impacted instances and volumes back online.”

It took several hours to fully recover the EC2 server instances and the EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volumes. A number of big web applications and popular services were down for much longer. Although LoadStorm was back up by about 8:00 am MDT, Instagram was unavailable until about Noon Pacific time Saturday, more than 15 hours after the incident began. Heroku reported 8 hours of downtime for some services, and ironically, Heroku is a cloud infrastructure provider that uses AWS data centers.

Load Testing ROI - 5 Good Data Points

Posted Mon, 06/06/2011 - 6:00am by Scott Price

load testing prevents losing moneyLoad and performance testing your website is important. Tuning it can have more than a 1,000% return on investment.

Some of the case studies referenced below show us that we can improve revenue 219% just by improving performance our site. Other data confirms that the average business loses $4,100 per hour when their site slows down under load. An outage costs $21,000 per hour on average. Retailers can lose $100,000 per hour.

It's possible to have a successful ad campaign or a wonderful Slashdot day that your site can't handle - and that can send
46.9% of your traffic to your competitors. Or worse, cost you 150,000 customers.

Take Web Performance Seriously

At the beginning of 2009, Denny's made a bold marketing move. At a time when many Americans were out of work, and those with jobs were struggling to make ends meet, the restaurant chain cut an ad offering every American a free breakfast. The ad only aired once, during a little event called the Super Bowl.

And that's when Denny's troubles began.

Within minutes of the ad airing, customers who attempted to access Denny's Web site to get their free meal coupons found that they couldn't get through. The company planned the commercial and the $3 million ad buy perfectly. What it didn't plan for was the ensuing deluge of traffic, which Internet marketing expert Rob Kmiec estimates represented anywhere between a 434% and 1,700% spike in the daily traffic to dennys.com. Had the company planned for the additional attention and invested in a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or cloud network to handle the ensuing load, Kmiec argues, it would have reaped nearly a 1,000% return on that investment. Instead, the company lost the opportunity to serve an additional 153,300 customers.

Web Performance for ESPN

Posted Tue, 04/26/2011 - 10:00am by admin

web performance espnIt seems like weekly that we hear of some very high profile website performing poorly or going down completely. Are site outages reported somewhere centrally? If so, I haven't found it. However, this one caught my eye because I'm a sports fan. Saturday night both ABC.com and ESPN.com were poster children for website outage.

Many people on Twitter were complaining and tweeting jokes about the performance of both sites.

Even Large Companies Have Performance Problems in 2010

Posted Wed, 07/14/2010 - 9:14am by Scott Price

I found this interesting because it shows how even large companies running on their own "safe" data centers can experience massive performance failure. SaaS and cloud providers may get media attention for outages, but isn't it somewhat hypocritical of Fortune 5000 CTOs to claim that their internal systems are "safe"? Come on, let's be real. Systems have been experiencing poor performance for 60+ years, and hardware will continue to fail, and software will always have bugs, and architects will overlook weaknesses, and CEOs will annually cut budgets for performance engineering.

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performance testing sign upIt's easy. You can be load testing in 15 minutes.

  1. Click the "Free Account" button.
  2. Enter your name & email address.
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  6. Analyze the test results.
  7. Send us a testimonial because you are amazed!

Customers love our load testing tool

“We needed an easy & cost effective way to load test our Windows Azure solution. Thanks to LoadStorm - highly recommended!” - Jonas Stawski, Microsoft MVP

"LoadStorm is a very useful tool." Alan Cheung, Manager - Technical Services, Dow Jones Publishing Company

"It has been a pleasure to work with LoadStorm." - Mike Compton, V.P. of I.T., Hearst Business Media

"Load-testing in the cloud was a great solution and LoadStorm a dream partner. " - Julie Hansen, COO, Publisher, The Business Insider

"There was no risk because I knew what the tool would provide before spending a dime. LoadStorm is a great tool." - Richard Ertman, QA/Release Manager, PETA

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