Introduction

Every e-commerce business person has the same dream: You put your site up on the Internet, you do some advertising, and the customers browse your site. The orders begin to arrive and the business is booming. That's usually when the nightmare begins. What if so many people come to your site that you can't handle all the business? Your site can only handle so many customers and browsers at one time. If others try to connect and the system is full, they will either get such a slow response that they will give up or they may get outright rejected at the start. Either way, capacity problems can do damage to your reputation and your bottom line.

The other side of this coin is also true. Building your site with too much bandwidth and too high of an investment in capacity can spell doom another way through the slow death of financial drain. It's a fine line to walk and almost an art form to perfect. The correct mix of bandwidth and capacity to match your business flow is difficult to achieve, but it is also the Holy Grail of e-commerce businesses. This chapter discusses how to achieve this arcane balance.

In this chapter you will learn what it means to have an overloaded site, how to measure that, and how to track down which components are the cause. You will learn what load is and how to measure it on a variety of servers and devices. You will learn...