July 5, 1999
Web applications often fail to scale, much to the chagrin of CEOs
CEOs and CIOs are beginning to learn what Webmasters have known all along: Building, launching, and managing a Web site is a complicated endeavor, fraught with dangers, delays, and cost overruns.
Auction site eBay was hit by several embarrassing service outages during recent months, one of which took the site completely offline for 22 hours.
Internet stock-trading companies e*Trade and Charles Schwab have also suffered from several embarrassing Web site outages this year. Schwab last month announced that it would pump up its Web infrastructure, doubling its number of mainframes.
It's a sign of the times that a Web site is driving mainframe sales -- and the company isn't embarrassed to admit it. (But then, the mainframe, with its processing power and broad I/O channels, is in many ways the ultimate Web server.)
According to a recent survey of Web developers and IT managers by the Newport Group, a Massachusetts-based research company, 52 percent of Web applications fail to scale -- they don't perform acceptably under real-world usage. In addition, Web applications, on average, are designed to handle only 72 percent of the traffic they receive.
The Newport Group's conclusion was that Web application developers need to perform extensive load testing prior to deploying their sites. That's not surprising, given that the survey was commissioned by RSW Software, which makes load-testing tools for Web applications.
But despite the dubious provenance of the study, the lesson is obvious: Web sites and the applications that drive them often run into trouble when faced with real-world usage.
InfoWorld is no stranger to this situation. The long-awaited relaunch of our Web site, InfoWorld.com, was delayed by several days as a result of technical problems, including performance and traffic-handling issues. Our IT department's Web team, working with engineers from our server vendors and with analysts from the InfoWorld Test Center, plugged memory leaks, added servers, worked the kinks out of the load-balancing system, and brought the system online just a few days after the planned launch.
Fortunately, we had our old Web site to fall back on, so InfoWorld.com didn't go completely dark during the interim.
The work still isn't done now that the new site has launched. We have a laundry list of smaller problems, which we are addressing while we continue to publish daily news stories on the site, put out a weekly paper, and conduct business as usual. And, in the midst of all the Web work, our IT department provides basic IT support to the rest of the staff.
InfoWorld.com is hardly unique -- I suspect that very few complex Web applications have trouble-free launches.
Once you go beyond simple HTML pages and start building true applications for the Web, you are internetworking, not just building sites. And internetworking, by definition, involves getting disparate systems to work together smoothly.
Internetworking has more in common with software development than with publishing -- and software development is prone to delays, feature creep, budget overruns, bugs, performance problems, and other familiar computing hobgoblins. As Web sites become more business-critical, CEOs and IT executives alike must deal with these issues.
How is your company handling the scalability challenge? Write to me at dylan@infoworld.com.
Dylan Tweney is the content development manager for InfoWorld Electric. He has been writing about the Internet since 1993.
Previous columns by Dylan Tweney
PC industry shows that you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear
June 28, 1999
RosettaNet decodes the long-lost secrets of internetworking
June 21, 1999
Clueless banks are spelling opportunity for online start-ups
June 14, 1999
Better claim your space: The Internet land grab will produce many minimonopolies
June 7, 1999
Every column since August, 1997
