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?
I have been using Urchin for about 6 months now. It has been consistently slow and ‘under maintenence’ during that time. In fact it has been so bad lately that this morning I had decided I was going to tell to ram up their googhole once and for all! Guess they heard me complaining =) and have redeemed themselves. Urchin nows costs what it is worth…
Amazing. Its the day after and the application is still not working correctly. Its not kicking me off as it was yesterday, but the data is not coming through. I guess Google should have implemented a more controlled launch.
Yep, almost 36 hours since implementing the javascript, no data to be seen yet. You’d think they’d be prepared for this sort of thing, or at least open it up by invite like they did with GMail to slow the takeup down a bit.
This is not what I’ve come to expect from Google. Still to this point there is no data in my reports. However the site now loads much fast.
Same here. Still no data. I hope whomever gets some data first posts about it so the rest of us know how the reports are.
Well, finally got some data after 2 days, although Google still says it is collecting the data and I should see it in 12 hours or so. I’ve had a quick look at it and it does seem quite good, also a lot faster and more reliable than when first launched, understandably. Also works quicker than DeepMetrix Livestats which I’ve used before, and has more features.
It would be good if they could shorten the time lag between the hits and the data showing up.
I am experiencing the exact same thing and i am really pissed now! I got some data tuesday and now it is friday and I haven’t got any data since. Are they out of their minds? At least they could send an email explaining things, but as usally they are to arrogant..
It seem that they are getting the grip now, but they have been damn slow!
Camilla