TradeMe extends 8400 auctions, explains outage
New Zealand's busiest site has suffered a rare crash.TradeMe crashed at around 10.45am this morning, and remained down until 11.10am.As with anything TradeMe-related, Big Statistics are involved. Spokesman Paul Ford told NBR that around 50,000 users
Chris Keall
Fri, 26 Mar 2010
New Zealand’s busiest site has suffered a rare crash.
TradeMe crashed at around 10.45am this morning, and remained down until 11.10am.
As with anything TradeMe-related, Big Statistics are involved.
Spokesman Paul Ford told NBR that around 50,000 users were online at the time, and 8400 auctions were due to close between 10.45am and 11.10am.
All of the affected auctions were extended by one hour.
"We changed some configuration settings within a database and we made some mistakes when we were doing this," Mr Ford told NBR.
"It was a stuff-up by us, and nothing to do with infrastructure faults or capacity."
TradeMe is run on separate data centres in Auckland and Wellington, mirroring each other so that one should be able to take over whole site if the other fails.
Mr Ford said the last major outage was for three hours, in August 2009.
Nielsen NetRatings figures give TradeMe 1.3 billion page impressions per month, dwarfing any other site.
Fairfax Digital, which includes TradeMe, saw profits up 11.3%to $A53.1m on the back of revenue rising 8.1% to $A101.8m - a stark contrast to flat results at the Australian publisher's traditional media divisions on both sides of the Tasman.
Chris Keall
Fri, 26 Mar 2010
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