Introducing the Elephant Curve

While having a few drinks with some French-speaking colleagues at  Le Meridien hotel in San Francisco during JavaOne 2010 I realised that French speakers have a cool name for a load phenomenon of online systems

It is difficult to tune an online system for the average daily traffic volume because it varies a lot during the day. Specifically in my experience it is common to see demand rise in the morning to a midday peak then lull somewhat in the afternoon to be followed by a lower mid-evening peak. Things then quiten down. Now my experience is in travel systems. The explanation we had was that though some of the usage was business related, a lot was leisure. And users would tend to search and book travel at lunchtime and then after dinner.

It turns out that French speaking people have come across the same phenomenon but were clever enough to give it a name: The Elephant Curve. The reference is to Le Petit Prince, a best-selling children’s story from  1943 which has been published in 190 languages. In the book a boa constrictor swallows an elephant. The silhouette of the boa then becomes an elephant curve. Though I did not read the book at school it seems that many people have.

Here is the elephant curve illustration from the book

So I plan on calling the E-commerce daily double spike the elephant curve from now on like the Francophones do. I am going to add this as a slide in my talks and to my Caching Theory chapter on ehcache.org.

Thanks to Ludovic Orban (Belgian) and Alex Snaps (German/Belgian) for appraising me of this.