The Real Test
Of course, even this highly complex simulated test was not the real test. All of our previous tests were requesting pages from our servers from six datacenters. That is nothing like 50,000 unique clients out in the wild, all wanting your page at the same time. That test would come in November.
We all waited with anticipation for traffic to start ramping up. On the evening of Thanksgiving, the traffic started coming. It grew and grew and the servers never had issues. Our traffic that weekend reached peaks similar to those of the first Yahoo! event. And whereas before, the servers were overloaded and the site was not returning requests, this time, all was fine.
Compared to today's traffic, the Yahoo! event is an average day during our busiest time of year. I find myself almost wanting another big event like that to occur but bigger this time. I have still not seen the breaking point of this infrastructure. I know it has one, but we have never had the means to test it until it reached that point.
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