My School website bombs on launch

By Ry Crozier on Jan 28, 2010 10:16 AM
Filed under Software

High traffic takedown.

Administrators for the controversial My School website admitted they were "overwhelmed" by traffic volumes to the site, which crashed on launch today.

The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) said today there were "initial problems with loading pages".

It blamed an "overwhelming volume of traffic to the site" which it said began around 2.30am "and then significantly escalated at around 6.00am".

"The situation is now improving and we are working to ensure this continues throughout the day," ACARA said.

"Information is being provided to advise users to come back later if they experience problems created by the excessive demand."

The crashes were another speed hump in the Federal Government's launch of the controversial site, which surfaces national testing information for every school in Australia.

Critics of the site have called on the Government to institute measures that would prevent the information being used to create so-called ‘league tables'.

The Australian Education Union has accused Education Minister Julia Gillard of ignoring the damage the tables caused schools.

It has threatened to boycott the next round of national tests unless the Government introduced measures to prevent the information being used to ‘name-and-shame' underperforming schools.

The Government has not ruled out legal action, fines or docking the pay of teachers that participated in any boycott.

6 comments in this discussion

""Ha, only the smart ones use ASP.NET!" Please tell me you are joking."

By Sams

Tags

myschool, school, crash, website, controversial, gillard, aec

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Comments: 6

scontrol Jan 28, 2010 10:27 AM	http://nationalfilter.net.au/component/content/article/9-users-to-blame- for-my-school-website-crash.html "This morning's problems with the new 'My Schools' website is not the government's fault, according to IT experts at the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Eekonomy. A combination of too many users, and users pressing too hard on the links, is causing the problem." Edited by rycrozier: 28/1/2010 03:54:17 PM
Sams Jan 28, 2010 2:20 PM	Still down. Now has a message: "Due to technical difficulties the MySchool website is temporarily unavailable."
Digger11 Jan 28, 2010 3:46 PM	Never anyones fault. Surprisingly at about 9.30 this morning the site was working perfectly proving that it could handle the traffic.
Ace Jan 28, 2010 4:50 PM	Who in their right mind would use ASP.NET for a high-volume web site? Crazy people, that's who! Anyway, the site looks nice and is full of meaningless numbers like "Selected school's average". The average of 'what' appears to be a secret....and "School ICSEA value" which again is a vague measure of some kind, meaningful to no-one but Education Department analysts. I doubt the average parent is going to be able to interpret anything accurately from the data provided, and I can see teachers are going to be spending a lot of time trying to educate parents on what it all means. Still, what else have teachers got to do with their spare time, eh?
roberts Jan 28, 2010 9:29 PM	Ha, only the smart ones use ASP.NET! I do agree with Ace though when he/she said "I doubt the average parent is going to be able to interpret anything accurately from the data provided". I guess only time will tell whether it actually achieves what was intended.
Sams Jan 28, 2010 9:52 PM	"Ha, only the smart ones use ASP.NET!" Please tell me you are joking.