iPhone 5 – Apple was ready for it this time

Apple handled the load during iPhone 5-launch

Load problems is almost a tradition when Apple launches new iPhones. When the iPhone 4s was launched the whole website went down and when Apple started taking preorders for iPhone 4 the Apple Store went down.

But no such problems when iPhone 5 was released together with new iPods, EarPods and iOS6. According to our measurements www.apple.com loaded just as fast as usual. Maybe Apple did their homework this time?

The average response time for www.apple.com in our measurements is between 30 and 100 milliseconds on a normal day. During the launch of the iPhone 5 there were no detectable differences in response time. As usual the Apple Store was closed during the event.

We’ll see what happens with reponse time when Apple Store opens up for preorders of the new iPhone 5 on September 14.

If you want to see the response time graphs for http://www.apple.com and Apple Store, check out the previous blog entry

iPhone 5 – is Apple ready for it, part 2

It is now about 2 hours after the iPhone 5 was revealed. Apple Store has reopened after being taken offline to get updated with new content.

We have not seen any major problems with the sites this time. Well, apart from Apple Store being completely inaccessible for a few hours while being updated of course (do they really have to do that, or is it some marketing stunt?  Seems a bit primitive to have to take the whole thing offline just to update some content).

The main website – http://www.apple.com – seems to have worked fine during the whole event. It remains to be seen if Apple Store works as well now after the event as it did before it, or if it will suffer from huge numbers of iPhone 5-shoppers checking out details and availability of the new phone.

Here are a couple of graphs showing response time statistics during the launch and a short while afterwards.

 

iPhone 5 – is Apple ready for it?

Most people seem to believe the new iPhone will be released on the 12th of September. For some time now we at Load Impact have been monitoring how fast Apple serves content to visitors at its website and Apple Store. It will be interesting to see if Apple has learned from the two latest iPhone releases and are able to keep the web sites up and responding quickly this time.

Apple normally closes its online store http://store.apple.com shortly before a new major release, but during the launch of the iPhone 4s Apples main website www.apple.com went down due to the sheer number of users accessing it simultaneously – http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220525/Apple.com_crashes_as_iPhone_4S_is_unveiled

Something similar happened when the iPhone 4 was launched, with Apple Store crashing in both the US and UK.
During this launch we will periodically be updating response time statistics for both www.apple.com and store.apple.com, showing if and how the increasing number of users affect the sites. As this event might be one of the biggest product releases ever, it will surely be interesting to see what happens.

Below you can find some graphs showing the current response times for Apple store and http://www.apple.com, as measured from two different locations (Sweden and Netherlands).