Will content resolution hold up during Black Friday traffic, and what if it times out?
Preparing a Hydrogen store for Black Friday. Last year a client-side testing script fell over under load and blanked our hero for a chunk of the morning. Not repeating that.
Two questions, failure modes only please, no marketing:
- Content resolution latency under spike. Published numbers?
- Exact behavior when a content request times out mid-request. What renders, what does the visitor see, what do I control?
2 answers
Taking your two questions in order.
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The documented figure is end-to-end response times under 90 milliseconds at P95. Since the fetch happens in your loader during SSR, it is not on the client's critical path at all.
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Timeout behavior is in your hands via the loader pattern. You include fallback content, and a timeout serves the default content instead of breaking the page:
const {content} = await context.croct.fetchContent('home-hero', { fallback: defaultHeroContent,});So the worst case for a visitor is the default hero, never a blank one. The page renders either way.
The timeout itself is configurable through defaultFetchTimeout on the plug options, so you decide the latency budget: set it tight and a slow response degrades to the default sooner rather than holding the loader.
For your preparation: pick the timeout that fits your SSR budget, load test with the fallback path forced, and confirm the default hero is one you are happy to show at peak.
Ran last Black Friday on this exact stack. One operational note to add: make your fallback content seasonal too. Our default hero was the evergreen brand one, so the handful of timed-out requests during the morning spike showed a non-sale hero to those visitors. Cosmetic, but the merch team noticed. This year the fallback is the sale hero itself.