My School crash stats disputed

A Sydney web developer has joined a growing chorus of techies disputing the volume of traffic that caused the Government's My School website to crash at launch yesterday.

SEO expert Jeremy Brown criticised the Government's use of ‘hits' to measure traffic and interest in the website in a tweet.

He told iTnews that accessing the My School homepage to perform a search counted as 47 hits to the site.

Looking at the search result  (a page web page with details of the school) added 13 hits, for a total of 60 hits to complete one search.

Subsequent searches used 10 more hits per search, he said.

The statistics were gathered using the Firebug add-on for Firefox, which can measure the number of HTTP requests per page.

Education Minister Julia Gillard said today that My School recorded nine million hits yesterday.

It was only rated to handle 1.7 million hits in a 24-hour period at the time of launch.

If every website visitor performed only a single search, it would mean around 150,000 parents accessed My School yesterday. Two searches per session - 70 hits - each would make it 128,571 parents. Three searches - 80 hits - would make it 112,500 parents that looked at My School.

The site's operators, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), said today there were more reports of difficulties accessing the site again today, which were being investigated.

These came even after ACARA "increased the capacity of the site [overnight] to handle the very high level of interest".

Gillard said yesterday My School had crashed because it was taking more than 2,350 hits per second - the equivalent of 39 people performing a single school search.