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I have Opinions about the #discoverbc website mess. As someone who did site performanc testing for, like, the Olympics that one time, the most difficult problem isn& #39;t technical, it& #39;s psychological: your tests have to be based on realistic usage scenarios. This is where most fail.
My guess is they didn& #39;t expect the flood right at 7:00am. /\ is a hard profile to provision and plan for, since it puts you in a while new league even if only for a short while. Throwing hardware at it isn& #39;t often helpful on the fly if there are integration bottlenecks.
I dealt with a sports festival where we had about 70k visits in the first 10m, with an ecommerce, ticket and mail system in the mix; we had to do multiple rounds of testing to clear each bottleneck, nevermind just sizing up hardware. It& #39;s a process.
Performance aside, looking at the homepage of the DiscoverBC site tells me they didn& #39;t really think through how people would interact with the site in other ways also - the UX needed way, way more testing too.
But the key thing is to think about how likely people are to complete each step, based on last year& #39;s traffic and interaction studies. Then simulate those at estimated max load+a bit, then add error and background traffic. Then see how things survive, fix, then do it again.
