When a popular website experiences an influx of traffic, such as during a major ticket sale, news outlets often claim that the website "crashed." But what does that actually mean? My personal definition of a "crash" is when a system is completely down and requires a restart to become available again. I'm curious if this is an accurate definition. Considering how web servers and website architectures are built, I struggle to understand why they'd crash due to high traffic. If crashes do happen, doesn't it indicate poor programming? I would think a well-designed system could simply stop accepting requests when overwhelmed, rather than failing completely. Is the term "crash" really just a way to describe a website that becomes very slow, like a pitcher that's too full to take any more water? If it's just a slowdown, shouldn't the requests still be processed as long as the queue has room?
1 Answer
Yeah, when there's a surge of traffic, like with those Taylor Swift tickets, it can overwhelm a site. Sometimes, the servers can't handle all the requests, making the site effectively 'nonfunctional' for many users, even if it's not a classic crash.
So, by 'nonfunctional', do you mean the site just ignores extra requests until traffic goes down? Wouldn't it still work for some users?