Portsmouth University unveiled its new site A Vision of Britain Through Time today, an ambitious project which uses census and other data to provide a very detailed statistical analysis of Britain's economic and social development. Except that the site immediately crashed due to "high level of demand" and has been temporarily (I hope) suspended. Fair enough ... the thing that irks me a little, however, is that I already knew this was going to happen. It happens every time a new Internet project like this is unveiled (or seems to, anyway). Is the level of user load on the server really that difficult to predict in advance? (This is a genuine question: I don't know. I just find it surprising how they always seem to underestimate it).
Posted by Alan Allport at October 26, 2004 09:46 AMNo, of course it isn't. It's just that,
1) Universities tend to be cheap
and
2) Universities often don't have the most competent technical people working for them. If you have experience floating a large, dynamic, high-demand website you probably don't work at a university.
These go double, if not triple, if the institution in question is a state school. Boy, could I tell you stories.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at October 26, 2004 10:13 AMI guess what I don't understand is why they don't just skip the token 'opening' and jump straight to the crash ....
Posted by: Alan Allport at October 26, 2004 10:46 AMWhile I agree with Alan Hogue, I should also point out that universities rarely think much about scalability issues. A pre-production site that easily handled a dozen requests a minute during development may well be able to cope with ten or twenty times that number during regular usage.
The act of publicizing the site is what causes the problems. If their publicity reaches its target audience --or worse is exposed beyond the target by a link on Fark, Slashdot, or Instapundit -- the site may get several orders of magnitude more traffic than was planned for under an accurate estimate of regular usage.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at October 26, 2004 09:17 PM