Why Kerala SSLC exam results Web site went down
May 13th, 2008
If any of you tried to access SSLC exam results online, you would have seen that all Web sites including those of Kerala government went down when results were announced! It is funny since this time there was announcement that a lot of money is spend to make the system crash proof and C-DIT is supposed to have a 34mbps link dedicated for SSLC results 
I think these Web sites are designed by some idiots at C-DIT. For example, take the main results site at http://keralaresults.nic.in/sslc08/sslc08.htm. This page has a header image which is over 22KB!! Whoever decided to put that image there must be a very stupid guy. Here are some calculations as to why!
When the results were announced at least 100000 people must be trying to access that page. The total download bandwidth due to 22KB image is 100000 * 22KB = 2200MB. That means C-DIT probably required 2200MB/sec line just to serve that image alone! People were furiously refreshing the page and hence the requests were probably 10 per user which takes the bandwidth requirement to 22000MB/sec
Of course if there is some interval between requests, the bandwidth requirement would be low. But still considering the sheer volume of requests (I think actual figures must around half a million users) the image was a big bottleneck.
It may seem funny, but removal of that image alone would have probably saved the SSLC Web site!
By evening all the Web sites came back online since every one got results through mobile SMS.
Interestingly cell phone companies seemed to have made a lot of money charging Rs.6 or above per SMS. Probably taking inspiration from mobile companies, a guy from karunagappally started distributing 24 hours before the official result announcement. He was making Rs.10 per result and Rs.500 for institute results. Unfortunately for him Kerala police was not very co-operative!
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May 14th, 2008 at 12:03 am
Government sites, with a few exceptions, are very badly designed. I know - I am a Web Developer. Just seeing those site make me want to cry.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Hey
Since cell phone companies were charged by the Govt. for the results,I guess they would have paid this CDIT guy to keep the 22kb image.
Its all in the game
May 14th, 2008 at 8:28 am
I was also thinking about improving the performance and to me it all seemed very simple.
Just hire 10 server from the US and host the same data on them with a DNS rotation in place and we dont need to worry about anything else. Take down the servers after a month cos there wont be any load after that.
There is no point in maintaining the entire database in Kerala servers itself. This is not national security information.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:37 am
Nikhil may be right. Three mobile companies paid Rs.1lakh for the results data. So it is only natural that they might have paid some amount to sabotage the whole system.
May 23rd, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Dear
The page mentioned is not C-DIt developed , its by NIC Kerala and I have put to notice about this technical comment.
I think this time C-DIT sites performed better than NIC, normally NIC only give good result response.
This year VS has appointed his left hand and anti Pinarayi KM Shajahan as leader of website updation and it showed some results.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:23 pm
dear
how foolish, it is to comment so cheaply on an institution which is working and known for the social commitment towards citizen’s and government of kerala. this is for your kind attention that the website you mentioned in the blog is not cdit’s that was owned by NIC. the problem you mentioned was not applicable for cdit website because there was much less image in the cdit website. but it was correct that traffic was very high on the begining hours but cdit play a vital role in disseminating result and resolve this problem to a large extent by sending result to the mails box of the registered users. so pls don’t blame without proper evidence from next time onwards. ok !
May 24th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
The news item regarding SSLC Site in keralatips.org clearly indicates that it is written by somebody who couldn’t grasp how the results served this time by NIC.
Of course, the first page footprint is little bit heavy, but it influence only for the initial page loading (Recent Higher bandwidth availability justifies this).
The great author of the article forgot to notice the Ajax technique used in fetching the results. So the repeated result fetches require only 3 KB transfer to the client! (Last year it was 4.66 KB !).
Actually we have reduced the bandwidth requirements this year even with more attractive and user friendly pages in action, which are not judged by the intelligent author of the article.
Last year it was 34 GB bandwidth requirement for all 4 major result sites in May month.
This year it will not cross even 17 GB. But still the number of page views served is equal or more than that of the previous year.
Again on the day of announcement of SSLC result
v Last year 25,000 visits were there, but this year it was 83,000
v Last year 3.6 lakhs page views recorded, but this year it was 12 lakhs page views
v Last year 3 GB data transferred, but in this year it was 8 GB
v Where is the bottleneck referred by the Author ?
All the above calculations are based on only KERALA Server Statistics. Once Delhi server statistics is available, the advantage figure of this year will increase further !!
Detailed news story regarding this will be published soon in NIC Kerala news site.
You can check the statistics at http://webstats.kerala.nic.in
May 25th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I just have one thing to say,
Whatever you do, it is not worth it if the site goes down when people try to access it!
I also admit that I haven’t specified any improvements you did compared to last year. Dude, it none of it matters if the site is not available!! I just pointed out one too obvious bottleneck which could have been the reason.
May 26th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I second Kerala Tips. The Servers were down when the results were down. Whatever justifications you provide - ie usage of ajax or stats in the form of GB’s of data downloaded - the fact remains users coulndt acess the site
June 7th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I would like to echo the author and Unni. I had to go through the same loop of refreshing the page umpteen number of times to fetch the result. I don’t care if these servers were running on a futuristic technology and high end bandwidth.For me as an end user what matters is the output what I get, which was not fulfilled. This can’t be justified by any of the ‘rocket science’ methodologies and post-postmortem data analysis the webmasters might have implemented! lost is lost, “There is no silver medal in the war”
June 18th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Arun - you have summed it up perfectly
to people from NIC who responded - this is an honest feedback from people who had used the site when the results were out. This is not meant to create an feeling of ill-will. Hope you guys take it in the proper spirt and ensure that the results will be provided as soon as they are out and with the servers not breaking down.
Cheers