General Question

Blackberry's avatar

Why do websites crash from high volume? Especially when they know they will be getting high volume?

Asked by Blackberry (33949points) January 20th, 2010
6 responses
“Great Question” (2points)

It’s so frustrating when my bank and other websites know that everytime at a certain time of the month, a lot of people will log in to their website. It’s normal and expected, but every time they end up having to do maintenence because of the high volume of people logging in to the site. I have stuff to do and now I have to wait 3–4 hours to do it :( So…forgive my ignorance because I don’t know much about how websites work.

Can you explain why this happens?

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Answers

CMaz's avatar

Because they have not figured out yet how HIGH a volume they were going to get.

poisonedantidote's avatar

basically, the site is being cheap and not paying for enough bandwidth, when the people who connect to the site start requesting more downloads of the site than the server can upload you get a ’‘back soon’’ message or some other variation.

they can probably fix it by upgrading, but that costs money and it may not be worth it to them if the traffic spike is only for a short period of time and then the site is dead the rest of the week.

trailsillustrated's avatar

its called cheap=low bandwidth like @poisonedantidote said

Snarp's avatar

The key point in what @poisonedantidote said is that it’s not worth it to upgrade for a temporary spike. They built the system for the volume they handle most of the time. To upgrade to prepare for record high volume that only occurs rarely is expensive, upgrading requires more servers and more connections, and all the work involved in incorporating them into the system.

Now if it happens every month on the first (or whenever people get paid) and it’s a bank, they should bite the bullet and do the upgrade.

MrItty's avatar

Why does your 2-cup measuring cup overflow if 10 of us poor 1 cup of water into it at the same time, even if we tell you we’re going to in advance?

Knowing that it’s going to happen doesn’t magically increase the capacity.

Blackberry's avatar

Good point MrItty lol. Thanks guys.

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