I see from this morning's paper that many people have failed to get their tax returns to the Inland Revenue by the end of January deadline, due to being unable to file through the Revenue's web site over the last few days. The paper reports that large numbers have reported "being unable to even access the website at various stages during the weekend", and a spokesman reporting that "There are no website problems". And although an unknown number who received "submission failed" messages have been given a further 2 weeks, anyone who couldn't even get into the system now faces a 100 pound fine for being late.

When you design a web site and consider you're traffic levels, it's important to consider peak loadings as well as the average number of hits per day. This is something that we always look for in our contract work, and we always advise on our courses. Almost without exception, web sites have quiet and busy periods and sometimes the peak is extraordinary.

* A client's time card entry system that we provided receives about 20 times the number of hits on the first and last days of the month as it does on a typical mid-month day.

* TV show web sites get extraordinary peaks when the show is on or just over, as do betting sites on the day of the Grand national, the FA cup final, the Derby or the Gold Cup

* An online ordering site that we've provided takes twice as many orders on a mid week day than a Monday or a Friday - people want to order and have supplies delivered in time for the weekend.

* On our busiest day in the last 4 weeks, our site got 52000 hits and on the quietest day just 11600. Looking back over the last completed 24 hours (a quiet Sunday), hourly hit rate varied from 443 hits up to 1108

Peak loading is something that should be considered on a case by case basis, with the benefit of having someone who knows the organisationand its history to hand to advise. We would tend to assist in this area on extra days, but the subject also arises on regular courses such as MySQL and LAMP deployment

I don't know what happened at "The Revenue" over the last few days - newspapers are not an ideal source of techincal information, so I can only guess. But on the surface it does look as if the system wasn't broad enough to handle the 5000 reported requests per hour yesterday - quite amazing when you hear of Slashdot servers that handle 500 requests per second.
(written 2005-02-01 08:18:29)

 G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility

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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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