I live in China for a long time. Last night wife and I up waiting for lock to tick over to midnight. The shopping cart was loaded up with about 30 items and just waiting to hit the go button so that the 11/11 special pricing would kick in. And then kaboom....tried placing the orders and servers couldnt handle it- lots of comms errors, weird errors that didnt even make sense in Chinese, but at least the cart contents never got lost or mangled.
I would like to know how many people were doing the same but a conservative guess would be over 100m concurrent users. We had to retry about a dozen times, including pruning the cart because limited stock of certain items was already gone in the first few seconds. Eventually got the order thru about 00:10am with 1/3 of items bought successfully. Now i know for next 3-5 days the courier guys will be heaving huge loads at every city apartment block. And in case you are wondering the volume of online sales on normal days is so high that courier companies have dedicated teams of delivery guys servicing each group of a few apartment buildings. I live in an estate with 4 buildings of 32 floors and here there are 4-6 from one company alone....and there are multiple companies. As someone who works in ERP software this is logistics on steroids.
Any...just sharing a story from the coal face from a HN fanboy.
I would like to know how many people were doing the same but a conservative guess would be over 100m concurrent users. We had to retry about a dozen times, including pruning the cart because limited stock of certain items was already gone in the first few seconds. Eventually got the order thru about 00:10am with 1/3 of items bought successfully. Now i know for next 3-5 days the courier guys will be heaving huge loads at every city apartment block. And in case you are wondering the volume of online sales on normal days is so high that courier companies have dedicated teams of delivery guys servicing each group of a few apartment buildings. I live in an estate with 4 buildings of 32 floors and here there are 4-6 from one company alone....and there are multiple companies. As someone who works in ERP software this is logistics on steroids.
Any...just sharing a story from the coal face from a HN fanboy.