Earlier this January I was taking the Christmas lights off of the front cactus (I heart Phoenix) when I came across an interesting newspaper article. Before you ask, my household rolls individual strands of Christmas lights up in newspaper and then stuffs the bundles into boxes. That keeps the strands from getting tangled in eachother. Moving on.

An article from the Asbury Park Press dated Dec 12, 1999 caught my eye. It was so novel that I scanned it for long term keeping and decided to share it here. The article is a 30,000 foot view of what websites have to be put through to make sure they don’t go offline under heavy load. In fact, it’s more than just a 30,000 foot view. It’s more like looking at earth from Mars using binoculars.

The very concept of eCommerce web sites was so new that the article doesn’t even shorten the term, instead using the uncompressed form “Electronic Commerce”. It’s interesting to note that testing web sites for load problems was a novel concept worthy of a newspaper article just a few years ago.

I will not reproduce the text of the article, but will link to an image of the scanned article. Pardon the wrinkles. It’s been wrapped and re-wrapped around Christmas lights for a decade. Let me know what parts of the article tickle you in particular.

Web sites need crash testing article