News of The Damned

Join us for a discussion on the importancde of performance on the largest shopping day of the year

We take a look at the failure of Junior Eurovision over the weekend and what lessons can we learn from its failure

Performance Antipatterns all around us

Crashes, Observability, Frustration & Delight

Deloitte ContinuedReport from the UK

Conversion as a function of speedCustomer Experience MattersMilliseconds make millions

Failues in the USAPerformance Engineering practicesThe importance of caching/CDNUser Expectations - Google, Facebook, et alGoogle Rail

How did we get here?Crashes outside of the USA

History of Black FridayHow did we get herePre Black Friday sales, why?Let's look at some crashes!

What happens when things go south

Big Themes for this year

Common Antipatterns with Mark and Scott

USA Outages

With Scott MooreShifting your loadHow to measure your user experience

Rest of the world, History of Black Friday, Mobile

On June 25, 2009 Michael Jackson passed away. In the 24 hours which followed traffic on the internet surged by up to 20% worldwide. Twitter failed after reaching a volume of over 5000 tweets per minute about the event. TMZ crashed and burned, as did the LA times. Dozens of more sites failed under the load. This was the largest single celebrity driven event on the internet in terms of load, but it defined a path that others have followed.Today’s Edition is bright to you by CatchpointCatchpoint’s mission is to help companies advance the digital experience of their customers and employeesTheir Digital Experience Monitoring Platform pinpoints performance and availability problems users experience anywhere in the world.Catchpoint helps the world's Internet Builders and Operators detect and fix issues with confidence—faster than ever before.Find out more at www.Catchpoint.com

Today’s edition is brought to you by Foulk Consulting ServicesFoulk Consulting Services (FCS) has more than 15 years of experience as a high caliber, industry-leading services provider of application performance testing, monitoring, and management with a strong background in software quality assurance. At Foulk Consulting we believe we have the greatest consultants in the world and we love growing our customer-focused relationships. Find out more at www.FoulkConsulting.comSaaS, The final Frontier. A buffet of services, from helpdesk ticketing to eCommerce. No hardware. No dedicated resources. Pay as you go by user. A Miracle of the modern I.T age. What could possibly go wrong?

Today’s Edition is bright to you by CatchpointCatchpoint’s mission is to help companies advance the digital experience of their customers and employeesTheir Digital Experience Monitoring Platform pinpoints performance and availability problems users experience anywhere in the world.Catchpoint helps the world's Internet Builders and Operators detect and fix issues with confidence—faster than ever before.Find out more at www.Catchpoint.comToday’s story boys & girls begins at a place filled with adventure, travels, monsters, heroes, tomes filled with ancient knowledge, from the center of the earth to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. On this dark & rainy night, our story takes us to the strand bookstore at the corner of Broadway and E 12th street in the heart of of island of Manhattan, in the city of Gotham

Today’s edition is brought to you by Foulk Consulting ServicesFoulk Consulting Services (FCS) has more than 15 years of experience as a high caliber, industry-leading services provider of application performance testing, monitoring, and management with a strong background in software quality assurance. At Foulk Consulting we believe we have the greatest consultants in the world and we love growing our customer-focused relationships. Find out more at www.FoulkConsulting.comI have a bone to pick with Academia. Nearly every day on the News of the Damned daily feed we’ll find students impacted in the use of Learning Management Software...and in particular for the upload of assignments.

Today’s show is brought to you by Catchpoint SoftwareCatchpoint’s mission is to help companies advance the digital experience of their customers and employeesSTREAMING and Load. Streaming and Load. I feel like I should be Burl Ives in a Christmas special with Rudolf or something….”Streaming and load….”Just today multi-platinum artist Blackbear went through a crash on the digital media platform Moment house.

Today’s edition is brought to you by Foulk Consulting ServicesFoulk Consulting Services (FCS) has more than 15 years of experience as a high caliber, industry-leading services provider of application performance testing, monitoring, and management with a strong background in software quality assurance. At Foulk Consulting we believe we have the greatest consultants in the world and we love growing our customer-focused relationships. Find out more at www.FoulkConsulting.comBots….. You should have the same fear of them that members of the united federation of planets have of the BORG. You should tell your children scary stories about them this Halloween to terrify them. Mindless. Efficient. Out to assimilate all of the resources of your website to meet their needs and no other

Today’s show is brought to you by Catchpoint SoftwareCatchpoint’s mission is to help companies advance the digital experience of their customers and employeesTheir Digital Experience Monitoring Platform pinpoints performance and availability problems users experience anywhere in the world.Catchpoint helps the world's Internet Builders and Operators detect and fix issues with confidence—faster than ever before.Find out more at www.Catchpoint.comEvery company with a public facing website wants to understand the user experience, and it seems like every member of the marketing department has their favorite analytics beacon. This has unfortunately led to an explosion in the number of marketing beacons per site. Adobe, Facebook, Google, hundreds of more (and it seems like more by the day). Now we come to the problem. You have dozens of people in your marketing department. They each have a favorite solution.

Today'e edition of PerfBytes News of the damned Daily is brought to you by Foulk ConsultingFoulk Consulting ServicesFoulk Consulting Services (FCS) has more than 15 years of experience as a high caliber, industry-leading services provider of application performance testing, monitoring, and management with a strong background in software quality assurance. At Foulk Consulting we believe we have the greatest consultants in the world and we love growing our customer-focused relationships. Find out more at www.FoulkConsulting.comSession is one of the more confusing items in performance testing and engineering because we use it so many different ways. Session duration is the time someone visits the site from beginning to end. Session objects are the items that we hold in memory until a person leaves a site. Session timeout is how long we wait after the last request to clean up the session objects after the last request. I want to speak about the first and the last because too many people conflate session duration with session timeout when setting up their web server, often with disastrous results on high load days.

Today’s show is brought to you by Catchpoint SoftwareCatchpoint’s mission is to help companies advance the digital experience of their customers and employeesTheir Digital Experience Monitoring Platform pinpoints performance and availability problems users experience anywhere in the world.Catchpoint helps the world's Internet Builders and Operators detect and fix issues with confidence—faster than ever before.Find out more at www.Catchpoint.comAs I was having breakfast this morning, I received a text message from Liz Daly of Dalydesigns in Greenville SC. Today was the first day of operations for a site managed by the South Carolina Cares act. The site opened up this morning to accept applications from nonprofits, minority owned and small businesses with fewer than 25 employees that have been impacted financially due to COVID-19.The site became inaccessible almost immediately for registration, reporting errors to users that the site had reached its available portal license limit.

Challenges continue in the LMS Universe for the 2020/21 Academic year

Yeezy, Financial industry Maladies, Remote Learning, and adults being adults on lockdown. We look at the power of celebrity and several industry wide issues

Today's Episode if brought to you by* Foulk Consulting Services: https://www.foulkconsulting.com* Catchpoint Software: https://www.catchpoint.comToday’s show is co-hosted by Brian Brumfield (Foulk Consulting) and Nithyanand Mehta (Catchpoint), backed up with observations from Tim Western in ChatWe face continued interruptions in basic services due to the Cover-19 Pandemic. In this show we cover a few industry patterns* Unemployment Insurance (Government) - We discuss user behaviors on a run on the bank model, the patterns of development and deployment that have lead to failures across states and countries* Grocery Stores - This is a worldwide problem associated with delivery to consumer, especially where populations are under quarantine conditions and it is difficult to book a timeslot for delivery. While the architectural patterns for deployment are varied across the industry, there are some common issues associated with dynamic pages, cart allocation, session and whether the delivery system should be commingled with the cart system.* General Government Information sites - NOCDN, Dynamic Web Pages, Hard Coupling for forms. How can these systems be revised for better performance in a short timeframe. Rather than tackle this at the site construction level we bring in alternatives on the web server front: IIS, Apache, nginx, Lighttpd, Cherokee, GWAN, plus varnish.* https://howmuchtoiletpaper.com/ - It’s the thing everyone wants to know, do I have enough toilet paper to survive the quarantine period? And that is exactly what lead to the demise of the site. While they did do some things well, such as employ a CDN, they also engaged in practices to defeat the CDN benefits. Off the shelf also cost them an optimized performance path.

Today's Episode if brought to you by* Catchpoint Software: https://www.catchpoint.com* Foulk Consulting Services: https://www.foulkconsulting.comThis is the COVID-19 Episode. In this show we cover several sites impacted by the COVID-19 Virus’ impact on organizations and end users. In specific, we discuss the Johns Hopkins University virus tracker, the HEB Grocery Chain in Texas, and the impact on Walt Disney Resorts.Lastly, we take a look at the impact of bots associated with online voting for @TheCdnAcademy.Along the way we touch on the topics of quality of data, staleness of data and how this advises your cache window for a site, CDN benefits and how this might be scaled down to an individual company, the psychology of the user population & the shifting of behavior by being proactive, and finally the psychology of bots & bot mitigation.

Today's Episode if brought to you by* Catchpoint Software: https://www.catchpoint.com* Foulk Consulting Services: https://www.foulkconsulting.comScott Moore joins us from the road and the Perftour.us to provide insight on his discussions with executives around the country on the subject of application performance and to lend to the discussions on our failuresIn this episode we cover the UK soccer industry websites, Cardi B’s ticket challenges in South Africa, challenges for the Martha’s Vineyard Steamship authority, and side effects from the COVID-19 Virus on Government websites.

Today's Episode if brought to you by* Catchpoint Software: https://www.catchpoint.com* Foulk Consulting Services: https://www.foulkconsulting.comIn this episode we cover the chaos of the Iowa caucuses, the challenges of the political season with politician websites, a Superbowl commercial follow up and the launch of Old Bay Hot Sauce

Selective ServiceA Princess moves to CanadaThe QUeen wants your MoneyKPOP and Ticketmaster

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comHow did we do over the Thanksgiving to cyber Monday period from a Performance Perspective? Join James and Josh Carter of Blue Triangle as we go through the stats on raw dollars, split on mobile vs not, conversion rate differences, website size bloat, third party componentry & some predictions for 2020Failures* 2019 ACA Failure at the end of the Signup period* Pete Buttigieg and treating website failure as success. Also referenced Jonas Brothers and the ticketing industry as a whole* Christian Times website and story endorsing Donald Trump impeachment. Run on the site after profiling on CNN Guests: Josh Carter, Blue Triangle

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comOK, So you have worked hard and buttoned up everything you can think of on your website. But still, something has gone wrong. What next?James is joined by a panel of individuals to discuss where to head when disaster is upon youGuests: Brian Brumfield, Foulk Consulting Steve McGinley, Foulk Consulting Herik Rexed, Neotys Mark Tomlinson, PerfBytes

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comKeep the load off! One of the easiest things you can do to improve performance is ensure that load that should not be on your site isn't. In this episode we hit some large areas whish are commonly overlooked which can dramatically impact your performanceGuests: Brian Brumfield, Foulk Consulting Steve McGinley, Foulk Consulting Leandro Melendez, PerfBytes Espanol

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comThe shopping cart. That little icon in in the top right corner of the website. It seems so harmless sitting there with a little number on top of it. Well, maybe yes, maybe not. There are many methods of deploying the shopping cart. Some are more resource efficient, and more scalable as a result.Join James and a couple of guests as we discuss Shopping cart architecture and how you deploy portends how you performGuests:Scott Moore, Scott Moore ConsultingMike Giacometti, Eggplant Software

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comCrashes/Slowdowns: Costco, Ulta, PetSmart, H&M, HomeDepotInsight is key when you are running an eCommerce website, as response time and conversion rates are directly related. As your site slows, so does your revenue.James is joined by Catchpoint software for insight not only into what you should be watching on your app, but also what you should be watching on your partners, such as your CDN, DNS and Cloud Providers"RUM is too late!"Guests:Nithyanand Mehta, CatchpointMehdi Daoudi, Catchpoint

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comThanksgiving Crashes: TESCO, FootasylumHow did we get here? How did a day after a USA only holiday becomes a worldwide shopping event?Guests:Stijn Schepers, Accenture

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comBrian and James continue to cover performance testing foundations. This week we stop at the topic of performance test reporting and why the canned reports from your tool are just the beginning.Crashes for the week: * Taco Bell Free Tacos* Facebook Libra Coin Crash* Exam Results (SSD GD Constable Results,CHSE Odisha 12th ArtsJEEE Advanced 2019TNDTE Diploma April ResultsNEET 2019DTE Karnataka Diploma Result 2019)

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comBrian and James continue to cover performance testing foundations. This week we stop at the topic of Guest operating systems, how this impacts your testing and your performance effortsCrashes for the week: * Tesla Model 3 Preorders, https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-china-website-crashes-model-3-pre-orders-gigafactory-3/* Ticket systems, https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/Fans-left-frustrated-as-Cork-festival-website-crashes-caf27f15-3336-4769-a9df-3c93c7def369-ds* Exam Crash (RRB Exam), https://www.odishabytes.com/students-demand-re-conduct-of-rrb-exam-after-power-failures-server-crash/

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comBrian and James continue to cover performance testing foundations. This week we explore the topic of Network and it's many permutations: Physical, Virtual, Wired, Wireless, fast, slow, really fast.Crashes for the week: * Middlesbrough FC* VW ID.3, http://www.auto-innov.com/2019/05/13/vw-id-3-reservations-crash-site-exceed-10000/* New Sneakerbots, https://www.google.com/search?q=SNKRS+bot&oq=SNKRS+bot&aqs=chrome..69i57.2745j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comBrian and James continue to cover performance testing foundations. This week we stop at the topic of Disk, or is that storage now that we have fewer platters spinning.It's one of those finite resources on any host and how you use Disk will impact your app performance as well as your test performance. Tune in for insightCrashes for the week: * Freetrade/Crowdcube* Snooker Social* Nigerian CustomsStorage, Jobs, Sports & crowdfunding

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comBrian and James continue to cover performance testing foundations. This week we stop at the topic of Memory and how Performance is relatedCrashes for the week: * @PracticalDev, https://gtmetrix.com/reports/dev.to/XP5HpEjl* Jharkhand Academic Council Result, https://newsd.in/jac-8th-class-result-2019-official-website-jac-nic-in-crashed/* Avengers Endgame Tickets - Multiple Sites crashing worldwide

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comThis week Brian and Jame go for the Brainz: No, this isn't Tarman from "The living Dead." It's all about the CPU in your box. Cores, INTS vs IRQS, Application vs System. It's What motivates your PCWebsite Crashes:Parliament pettitions, Jonas Brothers

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comBrian and James continue to cover performance testing foundations. This week we stop at the topic of performance reporting stats and meaningful measures. Along the way we take a look a a few crashes to see what we can learn about system performanceCrashes for the week: * Majestic Wine, https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2019/03/majestic-wine-site-crashes-after-tv-wine-plug/* UK Passport Site, https://www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/1098659/brexit-news-latest-uk-passport-office-website-crash-no-deal* Harry Potter Tickets, https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Harry-Potter-and-the-Cursed-Child-Curran-Theater-13681866.php

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comBrian and James continue to cover performance testing foundations. This week we stop at the topic of time. Along the way we chat about human perception, how Google measures time, site abandonment, legal requirements, etc..Crashes for the week: * Karnataka State Property Registration, https://starofmysore.com/server-crash-property-registration-work-comes-to-a-grinding-halt-people-left-in-lurch/* Brand challenges with Middleton and Markle, https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/why-brands-hate-it-when-kate-middleton-or-meghan-markle-wear-their-clothes.html/* concert tickets, https://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/news/gloucester-news/nile-rodgers-chic-tickets-kingsholm-2563314

This show sponsored by Foulk Consultinghttp://www.foulkconsulting.comIntroducing Brian Brumfield of Foulk Consulting. Brian and James will be taking a journey through 2019 which involves performance engineering foundations. This week we lay out some foundations and out path for 2019 as we interleave educational crashes with a core topicCrashes for the week: * h2B Visa Site, https://www.wsj.com/articles/heavy-demand-crashes-government-visa-site-leaving-seasonal-business-in-limbo-11546378055* Houston Rodeo, https://www.click2houston.com/entertainment/2019/01/11/houston-rodeo-under-fire-after-massive-ticket-sales-flop/ * CDC Website & Preppers, https://undeadwalking.com/2018/12/25/cdc-website-walking-dead-preppers/ All about memoryGovernment, Zombies, Engineer's plate, and of course Ticket Sales