Huge traffic forces EC site to crawl

Millions of internet users from India and around the world were a disappointed lot since they could not access the election results in real time on the Election Commission’s website.

Deluged by a massive 100,000 hits per second, the EC results website – eciresults.nic.in – was almost crawling, or just refusing to load, for a significant part of the day. Even when it painfully opened up, the home screen of the site turned out to be a stripped-down version with the bells and whistles, like election maps, etc, not being loaded.

The EC had claimed yesterday that it was fully prepared for the event. The website had been set up for real-time access to the election results from 8am onwards on Saturday.

It was to also offer percentages of votes polled by each party, the list of winners and losers, state- and party-wise trends, along with constituency maps and charts. The dedicated website was tested using Microsoft’s load-testing tools and was supposed to handle up to 3 million web-hits simultaneously.

“There were as many as 100,000 hits per second in the first half hour, leading to the slowing of the website,” Deputy Election Commissioner Alok Shukla said. He added that because of the traffic congestion, the portal might have slowed down initially but picked up later as it can take millions of hits at one go.

Indeed, that was the case. The EC had installed four new servers having 16-Gb RAM each with a connectivity speed of 35 Mbps to prevent the website from slowing.

Also, five servers of a similar capacity were installed at National Informatics Centre to handle the expected online traffic, at a speed of 100 Mbps, with one server handling the database. A source close to the development said the EC has spent around Rs 3-4 crore in the last six months to get the additional software and hardware.

One of the problems, added the source, could be that the traffic was not diverted to other servers fast enough. Moreover, in 2004, the EC had used Google maps, so much of the load was diverted to Google servers, because of which the traffic to the EC site was slow but the site itself did not crash.

“It’s difficult to design a system that can handle a one-time traffic like this since the costs may be prohibitive. Look at the manner in which telcos couldn’t handle the extra calls during the 9/11 tragedy or 26/11 terrorist attacks. At the end of the day, raw bandwidth comes at a price. So such stray cases are bound to occur,” said Internet expert Vijay Mukhi.