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Back in early August I wrote about outsourcing load testing to get online retail sites ready for the Christmas season - see “Testing if your shopping site is ready for the Christmas onslaught”. Well the Christmas shopping season is upon us and the performance results are in from two of the largest online shopping days of the year - Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving and the busiest shopping day of the year, is so called because it is the day that most retailers go from a loss (being in the red) to profitability (being in the black). While this is the largest shopping day for brick and mortar retail, it is also a very busy day for online shopping. Cyber Monday is the Monday following Black Friday. It is often the largest online shopping day of the year as people get back to work and use their office Internet connections to shop online.

Keynote Systems, one of the largest service providers for Web site testing, uses their technology and infrastructure in 10 U.S. cities and one European location to monitor the performance of a number of online retail sites during the Christmas shopping season. Keynote measured online retail performance for over 30 popular retail sites for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The results for Black Friday showed most retailers being ready to handle the high volumes and consumers receiving good performance for searches and checkout operations. However, not all retailers handled the high volumes. Wal-Mart.com had the most serious issues so far this holiday season, when their site experienced severe slowdowns beginning at 4:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Black Friday. The site eventually became unavailable to the majority of users, with normal performance not being re-established until 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time, experiencing more than 10 hours of downtime.