Google Analytics Fast Adoption Leads to Slow Service
Google Analytics, the new Google branded free web based version of Urchin, launched this morning to webmaster fanfare, which may lead to the end of such stat providers as Freestats or Extreme-DM. However, like many other Google launches, Google Analytics has been experiencing downtime and maintenance warnings – as the system has already been widely adopted (check for “google-analytics.com” url in your browser’s status box while loading a site).
Philipp Lensenn of Google Blogoscoped looks into the Google product launching trend of errors and slow servers on the launch dates, and also notes that Google Analytics, unlike many other Google product launches, is not in Beta.
This isn’t the first recent Google product launch that pretty much bombed. I remember the Google Reader go-live not long ago was just as slow on its first day. Now I’m almost certain Google will fix these issues within the next days, but why don’t they anticipate such heavy traffic or create realistic stress tests?
I’m not saying it’s easy to cope with sudden traffic explosions, but “easy” aren’t exactly the type of problems Google usually tackles successfully. They do have hardware. They do have smart people. Or does every new product and its team get only limited resources to play around with… until it’s too late?
