All my people right here right now

Rescue cat Parsley helping to write some JMeter tests

What's the story? Oasis announced a series of reunion shows and lots of people were very excited.

In fact so many people were excited that when tickets went on sale the ticketing website was completely overwhelmed. People reported waiting for hours and then the website failing at various points. This made headline news, for example here, here and here (the fact that site also used dynamic pricing, much hated by ticket buyers, also added to the criticism).

Websites failing when they attract huge spikes of demand when popular tickets go on sale is nothing really new- we have seen this before with tickets for Taylor Swift and Glastonbury for example.

These failures attract a lot of negative comments and probably rightly so, but I would just like to point out that most of the time things don't fail in this way... but of course "everything works just as expected" wouldn't be much of a news story.

The reason that we can do online shopping, buy tickets, make appointments, watch videos, use social media, do online banking and all of the other things that we rely on, even when demand reaches extreme levels, is at least partly because behind the scenes there is an army of people testing the performance of those sites to make sure they work as expected.

Recently I have been doing quite a few performance related training courses on products such as JMeter and LoadRunner, hopefully helping in a small way to make sure that in the future everyone will be able to continue using the web without any problems.

I can always rely on my cat Parsley to help out with writing tests.