@Anonymous wrote:
I totally agree. O2's website has been a joke for over a year or so.... but this is ridiculous. HAVE THEY NEVER HEARD OF PERFORMANCE/LOAD TESTING????
@Anonymous wrote:
I can not believe that with all the time you have had to prepare and knowledge of how many people will be trying to pre order you still cant get your IT ready. NOT WORKING. GATEWAY ERROR 502. Sort it out or buying elsewhere.
Sure they have and they probably do test under load. Except there is probably no test case for x amount of users press F5 y amount of times in a short period of time over an SSL connection going back and forwards z times.
Once you do have the results from testing, then there is the analysis of the figures followed by adjustment and running through the scenario again. Which all has to be documented for review and inevitably costs money in time and resources. Over the course of a year, this situation is rather small compared to the actual response of the website during normal loading periods which is more like the usual test cases they plan for.
Throw into that the setup of the cluster of front-end servers, databases and whatever programming language they use for processing then its not as straight forward as you think as there might be some other interfaces involved we don't know about. Java has its own set of tuning parameters let alone Nginx which they've swapped to from Apache (Source: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=www.o2.co.uk#last_reboot). Even the operating system needs to be tuned and believe me, even if the stats show its good under load, it can go wrong.
If you want to know more on the subject, google: apache performance tuning, java performance tuning and then lookup linux performance tuning. The subject is quite fascinating once you get into it.
