“ We “dark” launched the client a couple weeks before the inauguration, which meant deploying some Javascript code that would get executed transparently on users’ home.php. The code would make requests to our backend periodically, exercising our entire stack, including client, front end, and backend code. We could throttle the dark launch up and down to simulate different request rates and types and test various contingency mechanisms and failover levers we had in place. This was about as realistic a test as we could achieve, and allowed us to ferret out bugs and infrastructure and performance issues well before inauguration day.
May 2, 2009
