The answer is that they have all had highly publicized performance problems with their e-commerce sites.

It was reported that Genealogy.com launched with an expectation of 25m requests per day. They got more than that per hour. The network coped with the demand, the server crashed. Britannica.com launched and got 10m hits per day, 100 times the capacity of their servers. The network happily managed to get the requests through to them however. Callnet's on-line registration scheme took five minutes or more to load due to demand well in excess of their expectations. The delay was at the server end, not on the network.

What might this cost your organization? E*Bay's 22 hours downtime cost the company between $3m and $5m, and a 26% decline in their stock price. AOL's 24 hours of server downtime meant they had to pay users $3m in rebates. 16 hours outage for Charles Schwab needed a $70m upgrade to overcome the performance problems.

Ouch! A Gartner Group survey shows that more than 50% of e-business web site managers do not expect to achieve their service level objectives.

At best many organizations like those listed above have been embarrassed by their own success. Demand has far outstripped their ability to supply. Proper management of the performance of their systems could avoid so much trouble however. Benchmarking and performance testing of web sites before they go live will tell you at what workload level your system will break. If this is allied to high quality performance modeling, the modeling will show what will break, and what performance can be expected from various alternative hardware scenarios.

Ideally we know what the workload demand on an e-commerce system will be before we go live. We can never be certain as, unlike traditional in-house applications, what the user does or doesn't choose to do is totally outside our control. Armed with the knowledge of what will break and what is the best thing to do about it however, reaction to the crisis can be that much quicker and more effective.

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