The BBC reports that following a site rebuild, 10% of Barclays Online Banking customers are experiencing very long log-in times. So we called a few people we know who use the service and, while hardly a comprehensive sample, it appears that they all encountered lengthy delays. Our very qualitative initial investigations suggest that the new version is using frameworks to deliver the application and that it may be quite a reasonably sized download – multiple this by many thousands of customers doing this and a likely cause of the bottleneck is at the server end. Of course, a healthy dose of pre-deployment application performance testing could have identified this was likely to happen, so you have to ask the question – did Barclays test the performance of their online banking web site in realistic network conditions?
