DealNews: Handling Black Friday Traffic Spikes

The motto for retail bargain-tracker site Dealnews.com says it all: “Where every day is Black Friday.” As a specialist in sales and discounts, Dealnews manages enormous traffic spikes every Christmas season, which scales up in earnest on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving, respectively). In this presentation from O’Reilly’s Velocity 09 conference, Brian Moon of DealNews discusses ways to manage both seasonal traffic peaks and spikes from unexpected events. Moon discusses “planned degradation” in which non-essential features can be turned off to reduce server load, as well as caching strategies for peak loads. He also discusses how to adapt to the loss of a data center (21 minute mark) and content delivery network, and the performance impact of content from third-party servers. This video runs about 27 minutes. Brian’s presentation is also available from the Velocity 09 web site.

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