I Want Candy (continued)

Continuing my previous post, I broke down yesterday’s Halloween buying binge by half-hour.  [Traditionally, we’ve sized applications by looking at sustained half-hour peaks.]  See image pop below and PDF with additional commentary here. 

Some brief comments:

• The red box in middle emphasizes that we did greater than one million transactions in less than nine hours.
• Volume here is more dispersed than it was on December 24th of last year on the same system.  Volume really fell off a cliff there after six o’clock at night (makes sense – stores were closing for Christmas Eve).
• The peak half-hour was 17:00 – 17:30 where we did 75,000 transactions.  That’s some intense candy-buying. 
• December 24th’s peak was 14:00 – 14:30
• A ‘typical’ day for this customer has a 19:00 – 19:30 peak

As previously mentioned:

• This is one of our country’s largest retailers.
• They’re peaking here at ~42 TPS
• Unless you’re an association (Visa, MC, AMEX, etc.), a mega-gateway (FDR North, Fifth Third) or a big prepaid player (SVS, Blackhawk, TSYS), please think twice about telling me about your need for your predicted 900 TPS implementation