Capacity Planning

A Case of Inefficient Access

A new Internet Explorer download page was deployed just before the release of Internet Explorer 4.0. This page was complex, and the path to it led through two other processor-intensive pages, one of which was the microsoft.com home page. Almost immediately the site began to suffer processor bottlenecks. Analysis showed that a large number of clients were following a single path into the site, straight to the Internet Explorer download page, and that there were serious inefficiencies along that path. Streamlining the ASP code was not sufficient to resolve the problem. Nor was adding hardware the answer: Site engineers estimated that even an order-of-magnitude increase in the number of servers wouldn’t be enough to handle the demand. Instead, temporary measures were put into place:

• Pages involving frames, other than the site’s home page, were reduced to single panels.
• The download page and both pages leading to it were temporarily redesigned using only static HTML, rather than as dynamic pages.

This solution demonstrates another way to deal with spikes: Reduce the load by decreasing functionality, thereby lessening overhead. Once the load returns to normal levels, the original functionality can be restored.

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