My School website hit by over 2,350 people a second

By Ry Crozier on Jan 28, 2010 8:22 PM
Filed under Software

Cause of the meltdown.

The controversial My School website crashed because more than 2,350 people a second were trying to use it at 1.00am, according to Federal education minister Julia Gillard.

Gillard backed comments by the Australian curriculum assessment and reporting authority (ACARA) that the site was experiencing "huge demand".

She was unapologetic for a service she said "seems to be patchy" and suggested to users if they couldn't get on first time, "leave it a little while, then try and get on next time.

"This website's got the capacity to take 1.7 million hits in 24 hours. That means it can take 2,350 hits a second and even in the wee hours of the morning, because the website went up at 1am, there were some times that it appears that more people than 2,350 a second were trying to jump on," Gillard said in an interview on 2UE.

"This is backed up by nine servers and on and on the techie talk goes, but you know, 2,350 hits a second, that's a lot of people all trying to have a look."

She denied suggestions that the outage signalled the website had been rushed.

Shadow education minister Christopher Pyne seized on the failure. He said the figures quoted by Gillard suggested the Government "might be living in an alternative reality".

"Ms Gillard appears to be incapable of simply admitting to a mistake," Pyne said.

"We can add this to a long list of education bungles, which includes the Computers in Schools program which has blown out by $1.2 billion with only 150,000 out of 970,000 computers delivered."

My School launched today after a fortnight of controversy over the site. Critics say it will be used to ‘name-and-shame' underperforming schools and have called on teachers to boycott the next round of national tests that provide data for the website.

My School website hit by over 2,350 people a second

12 comments in this discussion

"Strangely @Digger, it turns out I was right: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/16..."

By Ace

Tags

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

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Comments: 12

Ace Jan 29, 2010 12:06 AM	C'mon IT News people. You should know that '2,350 hits a second' is not 2,350 people a second. One browser request (at least the first one) equals at least 41 hits, which is only 57 people per second.
funkyg Jan 29, 2010 8:04 AM	I agree with ace here although I'd like to check the actual site and see how many hits a visit involves. Anyway, either gillard doesn't know the difference or is being misleading (or mislead). The sad thing here is they should have predicted high initial demand, and high demand at certain times of the year and designed for it. This would have been ideal for a cloud service. Never mind using "9 servers", that will be wasteful when demand is low and obviously not enough when there is high demand. Have these guys never heard of Amazon's services (and there are plenty of other cloud hosts these days too. Okay so now we get on to whether the site is actually useful! Well as a parent it us interesting but I have to ask why they are publishing info but not acting on it? If the school is underperforming sort it out, if you just tell people it will have the effect of polarizing the school system with better schools getting better students and poorer schools getting anything they can get. This will increase the difference between them rather than bring them into line! I should also mention as I live in qld, policy differences between states. Just because a qld school concentrates less on the teaching that will give good results in these tables, doesn't make the education worse. I can only imagine how much they paid for this site too! To conclude. Dubious site usefulness, misleading comments, predictable demand peaks, poorly thought through hosting, probable over priced site....yeah good job government.
Digger11 Jan 29, 2010 9:27 AM	@Ace, When reported in the news, a "hit" is defined as a unique user. They don't use the IT Geek definition.
Digger11 Jan 29, 2010 9:32 AM	@funkyg About time that schools and teachers were held accountable for results. If a poor school has dumber students and crappy results then why not report the fact ???? It is so 1984 with censorship of the truth that it is great the govt. has the balls to stand up to the "pro-censorshiop" lobby who don't want this site running. As a parent who pays over $60k a year in private school fees for a leafy inner-eastern private school - I am more than happy to read that my money has been spent on an absolutley top notch education. Both myself and my wife work very hard to afford this, so I am glad to read the results. I was always told that you get what you pay for in life - with education it is no different.
ray73864 Jan 29, 2010 9:47 AM	The problem i see with the website is that it is basing all the info on year level, you just can't do that. WA for instance when you are in year 7 you are 12, in other states, a kid going from year 7 over here to QLD i think from memory, they would be in year 6 instead. Plus private schools aren't worth the money either. They charge such high fees and then still ask for money from the goverment.
laman Jan 29, 2010 9:47 AM	I am giving my full support to Gillard. I am sure only teachers in underperforming schools want to boycott the next test. What a shame to those teachers. I wish that they are taking this opportunity to improve themselves than ignoring the fact. Consider what would happen in commercial company, you are fired if you are underperforming or incompetent. The same should apply to school teachers too. It is sad that underperforming teachers think they have a government job and can get away from it without thinking of improvement and further development. I wish that P&Cs are giving power to vote for the termination of the teachers if they are underperforming and are not seeking improvement. Teachers in Australia are too focus on how many hours they are working than how to improve the school standard on the whole.
FrankJackson Jan 29, 2010 10:32 AM	@Digger: So the school site is more popular than google? and about 30% of the total population of oz visited the site in the first hour it was open? Google processes about 200 million search requests per day which is 2,315 per second.
Desk Jan 29, 2010 1:38 PM	"This website's got the capacity to take 1.7 million hits in 24 hours. That means it can take 2,350 hits a second and even in the wee hours of the morning, because the website went up at 1am, there were some times that it appears that more people than 2,350 a second were trying to jump on," Gillard said in an interview on 2UE. 1700000 / 24 = 70833.33 hits an hour 70833.33 / 60 = 1180.55 hits a minute 1180.55 / 60 = 19.67 hits a second Am i wrong? or can they just not do any maths at all?
jimmyg123 Jan 29, 2010 2:23 PM	@digger I went to a private school and whilst most teachers were capable, every school has excellent teachers and every school has teachers refusing to put in the effort. Not only is the data they base their ranking system on inaccurate but they don't consider variables affecting public schools. For example students being expelled from a school are forced upon government funded schools. This website promotes itself as a vindicator of educational injustice but its data is taken from very basic tests such as numeracy multiple choice quizzes. The unfortunate thing is, many parents will be taking the information displayed on this site far too seriously, which will only further damage schools who have the unfortunate duty of less enthusiastic students. It needs to be known that there are far more variables and external influences to be considered when deciding where to send your child. I am 22 years of age and I know this.
Digger11 Jan 29, 2010 3:29 PM	Those who think that not enough is done for disadvantaged schools and children should look at the great work the Murdoch Childrens Institute does through AEDI (you can google this if interested). It is federally funded, but used extensively to help the poorer and disadvantaged communities. This was last done a couple of years ago and about to be updated - so will be good to see what improvements have been made. Myschool is totally different in that it is probably too late at Year 9 level to solve early development issues such as reading problems.
Digger11 Jan 29, 2010 3:36 PM	@jimmyg123 The school I spend my family fortune on, actually prides itself on an well round eduction. Very strong sporting/community service wise. It is one of the top 5 in ICEA score in Victoria which I think means all of the parents are rich (unlike me). They also benchmark the children when they start (Year 5 and 7 Aims test) and then compare them to their VCE/HSC results. Their aim is for every student to exceed above expectations, which they all do on average. Not sure why myschool doesn't analyse schools this way - as the improvement as you are schooled is what really matters.
Ace Jan 29, 2010 5:49 PM	Strangely @Digger, it turns out I was right: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/165865,my-school-crash-stats-disputed.aspx