The engineers have written the last line of application code. The database is ready to go. The designers have put the finishing touches on the front end. The marketing people are out there hyping your new Web site like there's no tomorrow. All that's left to do is flip the switch and watch the traffic come flooding in. Except... do you know just how much of that oncoming traffic you're ready to handle?
It's extremely tempting to believe that there is no such thing as too much Web traffic. After all, traffic is the Web site's raison d'être; it is profoundly counterintuitive to worry about being too popular or to face too much demand for your product. Unlike other forms of popular mass media, however, Web sites have limited traffic capacity and break when forced to exceed that capacity. An audience of thousands witnessing first-hand the painfully slow response times and server crashes that accompany a traffic overload, moreover, can quickly turn a popular Web site into a laughingstock. Web surfers are a fickle lot and will quickly take their business elsewhere.
To be sure, detecting and identifying potential traffic-load problems cannot be done on the drawing board. "People assume that because they've used best-of-breed products, because they've done their application development with scalability in mind, that load isn't an issue," says Simon Berman, director of product marketing at Web performance vendor Mercury Interactive. "They deploy without testing and suddenly realise that their Web site can only handle 15 percent of their expected capacity. The fact is, every Web site is a unique combination of hardware and software, which is going to require tuning and tweaking before it works the way it's supposed to. Like it or not, that requires significant testing."
