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).
Load Impact Blog 