Takealot struggles to cope with Black Friday traffic

[Jamie McKane]

Takealot struggles to cope with Black Friday traffic

Takealot was suffering from slow load times and unresponsive pages minutes into Black Friday 2017.

[czc]

Didn't they know there would be a giant surge?

[Stefan9]

They did and claimed all week they would be ready. Only for their system to fail the second it started.

[Cronus086]

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/smart...ck-friday.html

While the increased revenue during Black Friday is welcomed by Takealot, an influx of new customers is another big benefit for the online retailer.

The increased order volumes from a surging base of customers also puts their systems to the test, which allows for improvements to be made.

Reid said they have been preparing their systems for Black Friday since the beginning of the year.

“We struggled during that Black Friday, the site went down,” he said.

The lessons they learned that day helped them build the site so it can handle high loads when “normal” sales volumes grew over time.

Being able to test their systems at such a scale is valuable, as it helps them ensure they can cope with future growth, said Reid.

Ja, well.. no

[murfle]

Ja, well.. no

One problem is that there's no way to simulate real world traffic. They were probably able to do some optimizing on the fly last year which helped loadtimes/etc, but also by the time they had those ironed out, the traffic would have been less (people got what they wanted, stuff sold out, got fed up trying, whatever).

And you'll also get execs saying "You want me to spend how much in order for our servers to cope once a year? Make due with what you got. Maybe rent a load balancer or your mom".

The only real thing you can do is have a fire extinguisher ready!