

300,000 hits per second make Indian election website crash - vaksel
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/3-lakh-hits-per-second-make-EC-website-crash/articleshow/4543753.cms

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plinkplonk
I can vouch for the fact that the Election Commission's web site crashed early
in the morning of counting day and stayed that way till the next day. Even
_now_ there is no detailed data available on the voting - the number of
registered voters per constituency, the number of votes each party got, etc
(there is only the winners vote count, 3 days after the election!). With the
large number of candidates in each constituency, the candidate/partywise
listing is critical for any detailed analysis.

From what I've seen of government websites( I do a lot of work for the Indian
Defence Dept) most of them run on single Win XP "servers". The EC server was a
(set of) Windows machine (s)(I got an ASPX error saying (effectively) "IIS
crashed" :-P). The local subcontractors that write programs for the government
have atrocious development skills and are usually people who can't get jobs in
the Indian IT industry (the standards are low there too, but that is another
story)

The one department that gets its backend right is the Indian Railways (the
front end design is completely unusable, as with other govt departments).

Oh yeah the government spokesman is clueless, as someone else pointed out
already.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
That is because the railsways make tons of money with that. It is the largest
ecommerce site in India by value and possibly volume. Plus, the entire
reservation system was online for a long time. So they definitely have some
experience is running massive systems

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jdminhbg
If anyone else has the same comprehension problem I found in the article, a
'lakh' is 100,000. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh>

~~~
russell
The article is utter nonsense. They took a peak number, 100,000, multiplied it
by 86,400 seconds in a day and came up with 8.64 trillion; should be 8.64
billion. Possibly Indians name their number groupings differently; the British
do.

~~~
ashleyw
No we don't, 1,000,000 is how we group. India, however, does group by two
digits, with the exception of the first hundred: 10,00,000

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streety
These numbers just don't make sense. Rounding the population of India to 1
billion the implication is that each person made over 8000 requests. Which
works out to 1 request every 10 seconds.

What I think they've done is taken the peak value and extrapolated out for the
entire day but even that doesn't reach 8.64 trillion.

~~~
sidmitra
news channel crawlers, generating real time tickers in the news rooms??

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FraaJad
what they needed was a static page generated offline and pushed online every
few minutes and a cdn like amazon aws.

Hah! good luck telling all this to the NIC (national informatics center)
webmasters who are running this off ASP.

I'm getting this completely unusable page <http://eci.nic.in/results/>

Almost all the indian govt websites, both at the central level and the state
level are beholden to 90's web design, programming and microsoft technologies.

It's almost a testament to the general incompetence of microsoft web
developers who still think that programming against IE is good enough.

~~~
andreyf
Wow, a MARQUEE tag! Stay classy, NIC ;)

~~~
FraaJad
Behold <http://irctc.co.in/> \- the ticket booking website of the largest
train network in the world -- Indian railways.

A mishmash of images for text, deeply nested tables, mandatory login even to
query available trains... The earlier avatar was even more horrible, and
that's the only good thing I have to say about IRCTC website.

Even with all this, I'm thankful to have online booking for the trains. The
other alternative was to spend 2 hours in reservation counter or pay 40-50
bucks to the local travel agent to do the booking for you.

~~~
niyazpk
Try <http://cleartrip.com>

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jyothi
Complete baseless conclusion in the article and the HN submitter has
manipulated title to create false interest.

\- Indian numbering system: it is not a problem with short range or long range
because even if you consider the smallest number 8.64 trillion is huge.

\- Given the active internet penetration in India (note most Indians
don't/still cannot access internet from home) 3L hits per second on one of the
internet sites is way high a number.

\- That leaves us with bots of all the election oriented websites that would
have popped up and the election commissions' website failed in configuring for
how frequently can bots hit, better couldn't they have exposed feeds or API's
for this.

Beyond all this is the India journalism which is constantly looking for
'breaking news' or <create> 'controversial news' or anything that can raise
eyebrows.

So the editor here must have made the mistake of reverse mapping 80.4 million
to 2800 without using "avg" in hits/sec and the mistake with extrapolating 3L
to 80.4 trillion. Note that the actual headline on the article is appropriate.

Server capacity is spoken in number of concurrent hits it can handle at its
peak not over a window. Possible that the EC spokes person too did not
understand this.

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diego
"Shukla said even heavy-traffic websites like Google did not get as many hits.
He said NIC had budgeted for 80.64 billion hits in eight hours on the basis of
2,800 hits per second but with 3 lakh hits per second, it received 8.64
trillion hits."

This makes no sense.

8 * 3,600 * 2,800 ~= 80 million.

3 * 100,000 * 86,400 ~= 26 billion.

~~~
randomtask
Substitute 80.64 billion for 80.64 million and 8.64 trillion for 8.64 billion
and it makes sense

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rythie
I can believe they got a lot of hits and site crashed.

I just really don't believe they got 300,000 hits in any single second. Also
how would they have even known? since the site would have crashed a long time
before that number if they weren't prepared for it.

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radu_floricica
Ok, fun making fun, but if you had to solve the same problem (official site
with unknown but probably large traffic), how would you do it? Other then
google "amazon ec2" or "amazon hosting" and see where it goes.

~~~
furyg3
1\. Generate some static pages and cache the shit out of them.

2\. Regularly update the important info and push that out at specified
intervals

3\. When your number of hits returns to earth switch back to dynamic
content...

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ComputerGuru
I've flagged this article as inaccurate..

Even with the numbering scheme differences, to take your _peak_ traffic and
pretend that's what you got steadily all day long is nonsense.

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josefresco
Hits is a meaningless number (if you're measuring visitors), I don't think I
need to explain why to this crowd. Maybe the author/source got confused?

~~~
jdbeast00
hits is more important than visitors when determining ability to handle load.
when I see "concurrent users" in a load test it makes me want to puke. a user
can click once a second or once every 10 minutes. each page load can load 1
resource or 100. hits is what matters.

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prakash
_NIC had budgeted for 80.64 billion hits in eight hours on the basis of 2,800
hits per second_

That tells you the story...sigh!

