There are many many sites outside of the Cryptocurrency world that handle 40k users online and consider it a light or even a very light load.
Poloniex needs to put a LOT more effort into getting scaled up into a platform that can handle the load they have - they have been FAILING FOR MONTHS at that.
You are seriously expecting a new exchange for cutting-edge crypto, experiencing ("ZOMG FOUR MOONTHS!!11!") unprecedented volume and load, to handle it like E*trade or Charles Schwab's OptionsXpress? Oh puh-leez.
Mange your unrealistic expectations. This is crypto, not retail. Poloniex is not Amazon or NASDAQ (yet
).
Polo's explosive volume/load may continue for many more months. Better get used to the growing pains.
If you can't, perhaps Polo just isn't for you. Try
https://bitsquare.io/ instead, it's decentralized!
Polo has been around quite a bit longer than that "four months", and their unhandled growth issues go back longer than that as well.
They are NOT a "new exchange" by Crypto standards, and they are not a new site by Web standards in general.
I also find it interesting that Huobi and OKCoin were not having comparable issues back when they were a TON busier than Polo is now (at least on the exchange side, I can't speak to customer service on those two exchanges).
No, they're probably not as big on the value of the trading done on their exchange as E*Trade or Scottrade (Schwab is quite a bit smaller on volume than those 2) - but they probably deal with a comparable number of TRADES in a day and might deal with more users online at one time than even E*Trade does.
Even at THAT level, that's not all THAT big by website standards - but they've been VERY slow to get their infrastructure ramped up, and the issues have been getting WORSE not BETTER indicating they are not putting enough effort into DEALING with them.
And no, Poloniex is NOT for me - I gave up on them a couple weeks ago but it took me some time to get my farm pointed elsewhere, and then they decided to hold on to my last withdrawal for WAY TOO MANY DAYS (not nearly as bad as PayPal at THEIR worst, but starting to remind me of the reasons PayPal has had *2* class action lawsuits filed against it, one settled by consent decree the other currently in process (discovery phase last time I checked) but largely about the SAME issues that were supposed to get CHANGED in accordance with the consent decree and never did get fixed - like arbitrary no-reason "hang on to your money for months and never give an explanation" occurances in LARGE numbers).