Mutahi Ngunyi has become a sort of
political wizard. A sentence with the phrase tyranny of numbers is not deemed
complete without the mention of his name. In his argument prior to Kenya’s
march 4th 2013 elections; he predicted the Jubilee would win the
election due the greatest number of registered voters. Now the same concept
used in the technology world is something people need to fear and a lot for
that matter.
We are talking about the ability of
online applications to handle massive traffic. Specifically we are talking
about what could happen if a website receives so much traffic that its designed
to handle and how we need to fear china. It’s an agreeable fact that Chinese
hacker have some form rock star following. It is no wonder that the greatest
number of cyber-attacks in 2013 have originated there.
Knowing the Chinese population, Assume
that for some reason a website angers Chinese teenagers. All these teenagers
gang up to not hack the website but simply visit it to confirm for themselves
the contents of the webpages. This presents a very tricky situation as most
websites I know have been built without following the due procedure. A visit by
say one hundred thousand users would render a website 404(not found).
The due procedure I am talking about
here is the performance of load and stress testing at the end of a development
cycle. Performing these tests brings out the inevitable issues that might come
up when the site is finally in production and tell the maximum number of users
that can be supported concurrently. It is a procedure that should be given a priority
since there is nothing more embarrassing than having a website down just
because it has a lot of traffic when high traffic is all website owners’
desire.
Read more about performing load
testing here in my previous post.
