Snow causes web site & service failure?

Before I go on I'd like to make it clear that neither I nor the company I work for are in anyway related to National Rial or their web site and that they are simply, being used an example.

During the recent snow in London this monthI became one of probably many furstrated mobile web users.

Most mornings I use my phone to check the satus of the train service running from my local station. Orange provide a pretty good service for this - in fact they feed this service directly from the National Rail web site, however as transport on that fateful February (2nd of) morning was seriously diminished, it seems everyone had the same idea and subsequently saturated the service with requests for information.

I then tried to access the national rail enquiries web site and found of course that that too was unavailable. In fact normal service did not resume until later that afternoon. I found this to remain the case for the following few days every morning - an obvious effect of the internet activity of the commuting public.

So what can be done about this?

Effective performance testing will improve the performance of the site under test by enableing technical resources to adjust tuning ettings in the applciation and therefore make it as lean as possible meaning more people can access the site and have a satisfactory response from it at one time. However if the whole country suddenly demands the web site we'll probably still have a problem in these rare cases. Perhaps a solution might be to use a queueing mechanism similar to that that we see in call centres - giving everyone a chance to use the system. Either way performance testing and tuning will ensure that the application is the best ist can be.

Application level monitoring from an end user perspective would alert operatives that the site is not available from the moment that it's down, additionally as soon as the site starts to suffer with poor response times or internittent

It's on my wish list to speak to National Rail!