Their site has been slow at least since Monday. I wonder if their
migration to new servers isn't going as well as hoped?

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 8:48 AM, J. L. Trantham wrote:

Now, I'm not sure what kind of testing they did, but it seems to me, they almost willy-nilly beefed up the servers and annouced Free Day around the same time. It doesn't seem they tested the servers to handle such a load, or simply the response they are receiving from the public is so massive, that they simply underestimated what they needed by a factor of 10! That or their webservers aren't configured right =)

John Foege
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Krull steve-krull@cox.net
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 09:52:52
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurementtime-nuts@febo.com
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Sparkfun

Their site has been slow at least since Monday. I wonder if their
migration to new servers isn't going as well as hoped?

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 8:48 AM, J. L. Trantham wrote:

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john.foege@gmail.com wrote:

What better test of server performance as a ten-fold increase in load?
Let it hit early... so you can learn from it while you have people
standing by.

Cheers,
Magnus

In message 4B4603E5.4050200@rubidium.dyndns.org, Magnus Danielson writes:

And at only $100.000 - undoubtedly a lot extra sales, they get the
testing for cheap.

Best way to performance test an ecommerce site I've seen.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG        | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer      | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Good Advertisement for a company in Electronics...

Happy New Year to everyone,
Bernard

-----Message d'origine-----
De : time-nuts-bounces@febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-bounces@febo.com] De la
part de Magnus Danielson
Envoyé : jeudi 7 janvier 2010 16:55
À : john.foege@gmail.com; Discussion of precise time and frequency
measurement
Objet : Re: [time-nuts] Sparkfun

john.foege@gmail.com wrote:

almost willy-nilly beefed up the servers and annouced Free Day around the
same time. It doesn't seem they tested the servers to handle such a load, or
simply the response they are receiving from the public is so massive, that
they simply underestimated what they needed by a factor of 10! That or their
webservers aren't configured right =)

What better test of server performance as a ten-fold increase in load?
Let it hit early... so you can learn from it while you have people
standing by.

Cheers,
Magnus

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Actually, they upgraded the servers right before the last free day and used
that day as a shake down test for the new systems.  (A month ago or so).  I
think they're just slammed with a lot more customers this time around.

-Bob

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 8:38 AM, john.foege@gmail.com wrote:

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

Indeed. Creating a (tailour made) test-suite can take alot of man hours,
and while it can bash out a number of performance issues, there is no
replacement to real load. Toss in the advertisement aspect (I've
received the news through three independent sources of various forms of
social networks) you have a real winner.

I don't really object to it. It's a win-win kind of solution. We, the
customers, gets the toys cheap when we act like crash-head dummies for
their new site. Modern technology takes new approaches. This is clearly
one of them. But the fundamental concept isn't entrierly new, but the
level gain of doing has not been seen before.

Cheers,
Magnus

Dan Rae wrote:

You could order it from them on a regular day. :)

HAhaha... so true.

Cheers,
Magnus

I've worked in IT for a long time, and I gurantee you, the guys in Sparkfun's IT staff are all freaking out right now!! Haha, gotta love that good ol' disaster stress in IT!

John Foege
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

-----Original Message-----
From: Magnus Danielson magnus@rubidium.dyndns.org
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:28:46
To: danrae@verizon.net; Discussion of precise time and frequency measurementtime-nuts@febo.com
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Sparkfun

Dan Rae wrote:

You could order it from them on a regular day. :)

HAhaha... so true.

Cheers,
Magnus

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F1ETB wrote:

I don't know Bernard.  Having just wasted an hour plus of my life on it
I don't think I will return there again.

Dan

On 1/7/10 8:32 AM, "Dan Rae" danrae@verizon.net wrote:

Hmm. Let's see.. You potentially were saving $100 on something, and you
spent an hour.  That's $100/hr.  And you truly were glued to the keyboard
and screen, doing nothing else? No checking the email? Reading xkcd or
slashdot?  Even if you didn't successfully get an order in, you were
basically making an informed bet that your time was worth less than the
potential savings, since you could have aborted the transaction at any time
after starting, and moved onto some other potentially more remunerative
activity.

Yes, it's frustrating. But a bad deal? I think not.

Now, standing in line for 7 hours at some government office where there is a
cellphone ban, only to be told that you have been standing in the wrong
line:  That is a waste of time, unless the value of the service is pretty
darn high (e.g. Keeping you out of prison or something)

Jim

They are on eBay as well

Sent from my Banana Jr. mobile device

On Jan 7, 2010, at 8:17 AM, Dan Rae danrae@verizon.net wrote:

I fully agree, Dan !!!

Regards,
Bernard

-----Message d'origine-----
De : time-nuts-bounces@febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-bounces@febo.com] De la
part de Dan Rae
Envoyé : jeudi 7 janvier 2010 17:32
À : Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
Objet : Re: [time-nuts] Sparkfun

F1ETB wrote:

I don't know Bernard.  Having just wasted an hour plus of my life on it
I don't think I will return there again.

Dan

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A couple of thoughts --

• Refusing to let people into the site at all is probably the best approach,
  if you find yourself completely swamped with traffic.  A customer  who sees
  10-second ping times is likely to be even more annoyed than one who gets a

404. What they should have done, though, is served those people a static
     text page apologizing for the delay and inviting them to try again later...
     while at the same time trying to discourage them from hitting F5 over and
     over.

• If their hosting provider isn't capable of temporarily boosting their
  bandwidth as needed, that's kind of lame.  It should be almost impossible to
  "slashdot" any professionally-run e-commerce site these days.  If nothing
  else, they could have rented some time on EC2 to test their connectivity
  beforehand.

• Somebody may be DoS'ing them.  Perhaps DigiKey or Jameco rented a botnet
  for the occasion. :-P

• You can always order Prologix adapters directly from their site at
  http://www.prologix.biz , although sans the $100 discount.

-- john, KE5FX

On 1/7/10 10:14 AM, "John Miles" jmiles@pop.net wrote:

My wife deals with this sort of thing (supporting new customer facing
websites) at a Fortune 500 company, and they still get bitten
occasionally... You can do all the planning, arrange for fallbacks, and
still stuff happens.

It's tricky to serve alternate static pages, especially since you probably
have a multi tier architecture to achieve persistence (after all, each HTML
"GET" conceivably goes to a different server thread, so you need some clever
way to keep track of session state for all the users.).. If you had a single
threaded server, there's no way to serve an alternate page if you get backed
up, and if you have a multithreaded server, it's tough to keep track of the
state.  A lot of folks just tough it out and hope they have enough capacity
to make it through.  You do a cost benefit analysis... "do I spend 50K on
labor to implement a bullet proof solution, or do I just fling it out there
and hope for the best"

It's if it happens over and over at the same place, I get cranky, but this
probably isn't in that category.

Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

Regardless, I think they learn some lessons right now, regardless of the
level of preparation. There is only one way to learn, try it out and fail.

Friends of me works for the largest sale-site in Sweden (no, that's not
eBay). The one thing they nag most about is the is actually the
incompability of various web clients (mostly of older versions of one
particular client). Other problems seems doable since they care about
having enought servers, enought separation and enought redundancy. They
can be biten too, but last I heard it was not a big problem.

Cheers,
Magnus

Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

Ho-ho-, it's fun dealing with government agencies...

"Sir, you've been standing in the wrong line. You need Line
2B-XZ342/A-alpha, which is over there by the payphone."
"But your colleague said I needed to stand in this..."
"I cannot comment on my colleague's actions. Go stand in line
2B-XZ342/A-alpha, or you may feel free to leave and return another day."

And you get to the end of that line, and get...
"Sir, we're closing. Come back tomorrow, when we'll be open 10:30AM to 3PM."

(why 10:30 to 3? because 9 to 5 would be too easy)

And when you eventually get to the front of the right line...

"You need form KL6/PM-gamma-2-1-slash-four-beta-two version 1.08c, this
is form KL6/PM-gamma-2-1-slash-four-beta-two version 1.08b."

Mmm, red tape...

--
Phil.
lists@philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/

At 13:09 -0800 07-01-2010, David Martindale wrote:

What, like MS Terraserver a decade earlier?

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/msg/a5995bdb92449c9b

JD 'history repeats on itself' B.

In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is
nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- RFC 1925, "Fundamental Truths of Networking"

2010/1/8 Poul-Henning Kamp phk@phk.freebsd.dk:

Sounds like it failed the test to me, unless they planned it that way.

Steve Rooke

--
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
A man with one clock knows what time it is;
A man with two clocks is never quite sure.