One of the issues we hear a lot about is web site load testing. Specialists in this area are apparently falling over themselves to offer web site operators their services for very reasonable rates. Some even offer benchmarking for free. Stress testing is, it seems, one of the simplest, easiest and cheapest things that a web site operator can do.
So why is it that every time I need to visit a site at a peak time, it is very rarely available?
I live in Kent, about 45 miles from central London. This has nothing to do with a desire to live near my parents and their fridge and washing machine, or an incident involving me, Ken Livingstone and a restraining order (as far as I know, he is still refusing to recognise it).
Most of the time Kent is perfectly fine. When London is full of shoppers, day-trippers and aimless tourists, I can sit safely, securely and comfortably in my country retreat and consider how lucky I am that the biggest problem in my world is whether to take the bin out today, tomorrow, or some time next week.
Where I live is nice, even if most of the men wear those waxy green jackets and yellow cords, and the women wear their faces somewhere round the back of the ears. But last week life took a turn for the worse when the train company that has the honour of transporting me and thousands of other sniffing, grumbling people to and from the metropolis each day decided it would prefer to carry out some engineering work rather than go through the hassle of running some boring trains.
When I heard about this on the radio, I logged onto the SouthEastern Trains journey checker page for an update on the situation. It was about as useful as the wheezing denizen of the ticket booth at my station, who, when I asked what was happening the last time the engineering works overran, answered: “Whaaasatt? No. Trains. Delay.”
So many people were trying to find out what was going on that the site was as overloaded as a bierkeller wench trying to juggle 10 steins of lager. All it could manage was something about unexpected traffic and high demand, along with a few priceless nuggets of information such as the fact that my train was running two hours late, but not to worry because it was cancelled anyway.
When a supposedly up-to-the-minute online travel information page is no more use than a three-year-old paper timetable, you do begin to wonder whether load-balancing and site testing exist at all.
