300,000 hits per second make Indian election website crash

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

This makes no sense.

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

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

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.

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

That tells you the story...sigh!