Instapaper, a "read later" tool for saving web pages to read on other devices or offline, suffered an extensive outage 2 weeks ago. While Instapaper hit a unique problem — a file size limitation — its experience speaks to a much larger problem: scaling a database is difficult, and never quick. That basic fact explains why outages like this are surprisingly common ...

Industrial and technological revolutions happen because new manufacturing systems or technologies make life easier, less expensive, more convenient, or more efficient. It's been that way in every epoch – but Continuity Software's new study indicates that in the cloud era, there's still work to be done ...

There's nothing like a major web outage to remind us how much our applications rely on other web services and technologies to function. In late October of last year, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, one of the largest Domain Name Service (DNS) providers on the internet, disrupted service for consumer and business applications across the web. This attack shed light on the delicate interdependent nature of the web as productivity and uptime across the world was effected ...

Apica highlights the following trends and predictions for 2017, covering the API Economy, ecommerce, analytics and more ...

Cyber Monday, what seems to be a yearly ritual is continuing – online retailers know they're going to get hit with huge traffic, and still, there are site performance (speed, availability) disappointments. While 2013 to 2015 Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekends saw a few lengthy site outages by big-name retailers, 2016 has proven to be the year of mini-outages and slowdowns. Some were resolved quickly; others more slowly. Here are the key takeaways from this year's holiday season ...

Almost one-third (28 percent) of customers will not return to a slow site, according to SOASTA's 2016 Holiday Retail Insights Report ...

Black Friday. Retailers know it's coming every year, and still – every year – someone has a spectacular failure. This year Macy's gets top billing – asking customers to wait to shop. Since 500 milliseconds of web delay is estimated to cost 5% of revenue, how much can we guess Macy's lost by asking EVERY shopper, for hours, to wait to shop? It's clearly in the millions of dollars ...

The most destructive root cause of 75 percent of outages during big online events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unplanned configuration changes to a system – when IT and Ops teams find something they think might cause a problem and try to fix it immediately, unintentionally creating a much bigger issue for the web or mobile site. The following are BigPanda's top recommendations for preventing outages during throughout the entire holiday shopping season ...

Companies with B2C and SaaS B2B models must ensure that their websites and web applications are fast. To improve the speed of your site or application, whether on your internal or external network, you must focus on three key metrics that will help lead you in the right direction to plan for or solve performance issues. In this final blog of the series, I finish up with the most important metric of all – the one visitors care about – response time ...

With the increased scrutiny on web performance by Google, companies with B2C and SaaS B2B models must ensure that their websites and web applications are fast. It's widely accepted that the time it takes a web page to load should be something closer to 1 second. It's at this time that users begin to notice if an interface is slow. Most users are gone by the time 10 seconds comes around. If your site or application relies on users buying what you're selling, those seconds can mean the difference between a visitor buying from you or your competitor. To improve the speed of your site or application, whether on your internal or external network, you must focus on three key metrics that will help lead you in the right direction to plan for or solve performance issues. In this blog I discuss Metric #1: Number of HTTP Requests ...

On the first Sunday of the NFL season, ESPN's fantasy football app crashed. We see these types of stories often during so-called "surge" events, like when Black Friday takes down a retailer. Why? Often, it's the database that's been swamped in the process ...