Beautiful Testing

Can’t Handle the Load? Change the UI

Very shortly after the “memory leak that wasn’t” incident, it was decision time for the financial planning application. The application was functioning, but we simply did not believe that we could improve the performance enough to handle the Super Bowl commercial–inspired peak. I hadn’t been included in the discussion of options until at least two weeks after both the client and the development team had become very concerned. I’m not exactly sure why I was invited to the “what are we going to do” meeting with the client that day, but it turned out that whoever invited me, intentionally or accidentally, was probably glad they did.

The short version of the problem was that the application gave all indications of being completely capable of handling the return user load, but that, if the projections were close to being correct, there was no way the architecture could handle the peak new user load generated by the Super Bowl advertising campaign. What I didn’t know until I got to the meeting on that day was that we’d reached the point of no return in terms of hardware and infrastructure. The application was going to run in the existing environment. The question now was, what to do about the usage peak generated by the marketing campaign?

For about 30 minutes, I listened to one expensive and/or improbable idea after another get presented and rejected. The most likely option seemed to be to lease four identical sets of hardware and find a data center ...