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Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

They designed the system to support 1,000,000 users per hour over 24 hours.

Of course the census is Tuesday evening so it's more like 20,000,000 users in one hour.

Politicians would argue that this sounds like a good test, but technology doesn't do political word games.

It's not every citizen (~23M) but rather per household (~10M) that would use the system. Not everyone is online or choose the online option so it'd be less than 10M users total but even a conservative back of a napkin estimate would show that in the after dinner hours on census night they'd have to be dealing with closer to 3M to 4M users per hour peaks.

Very badly planned. They even gloated that the 1M/hour peak the system was designed to deal with was twice what they needed and it'd all be fine even when lots of experts were pointing out that that wasn't going to cope.

I think every Australian has two weeks to complete the Census. Why they advertised August 9 as "Census Night" I don't know.

You're supposed to answer with respect to August 9 - it's a snapshot of every person in Australia as of that night.

http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/getonli...

"Get online on August 9"

Yeah I think since the fiasco they've suddenly been bandying about "Oh you have until August 23rd, there's no rush guy just chill okay" but that was after months of "If you don't fill it in on August 9th we'll fine you $180/day" to try and shut down people calling for boycotts after the changes they shoved through the week before Christmas that allows them to keep the data linked to everyone's name for 4 years.

That was certainly one mistake. How they overlooked the fact that almost everyone was going to get home, eat, and then hit the Census site afterwards, beats me. It was a prevailing theme for everyone I know, sitting there refreshing and then making fun of it all on Twitter.

August 9 is the 'snapshot' night so you respond as from that night no matter when you fill it in.

Benefit of being overseas: didn't have to get caught up in the disaster

It is actually every citizen. I live in two share houses and everyone has to fill it out.

Although I'm away at the moment so didn't get counted!

Shared houses are an edge case, yes if you don't want to share your private data (income, health, etc.) with other members of the share you can do your own census form but for the vast majority of Australia all members of a household go onto a single census entry. In your example you'd only be putting in an entry for the share house you were staying in on the night of the 9th, it doesn't matter one bit that you live in two share houses - the census is just a snapshot of August the 9th.

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