Gyaan Sutra

Like always, the IIM servers have crashed again.

As expected, the 240,000 students and their parents and friends are busy opening the same page and as a result the servers have not been able to handle the pressure.

At peak load, I would expect no more than 240,000 x 10 requests over the one hour period when the results come out. A rate of about 650-700 requests per second.

I haven’t been able to get the exact page size of catiim.in site yet, but I would expect it to be less than 20kb. Hence the required download rate would be about 13.5 Mbps.

Now, I have heard that IIMs usually outsource this part to a private company which can handle the data. So I did some checking up, and catiim.in site resides on a websrvr.soft.net server, which is believe it or not, from Software Technology Park of India, Bangalore.

I find it strange that even they have failed to design a system which can handle the traffic. Either the budgets are too low, or there isn’t enough technical expertise to handle the same. Though I am sure that none of the above is an issue which can’t really be fixed.

So why do we still have to make the students keep trying again and again. Even with the coming of the IT revolution in India, do we still lack the infrastructure?

UPDATE : Even though the capacity I have considered is taking the worst case factor into consideration, it is possible to use service which scale to that level.

I had expected a download rate of 13.5 Mbps which translates to about 1139 GB of data transfer per day.

I was just trying to find out if Amazon Webservices are able to scale to that level and I found something interesting

Within the next day, the news was covered by both SlashDot and Boing Boing, sending a tremendous amount of traffic to its web site. With its media files stored in Amazon S3, it was able to instantly scale and handle the 3.5 million requests and 758 GBs in bandwidth in a single day.

Hmm.. So it might work. And what about the cost? Here is what the article says

Blue Origin’s total charge for Amazon S3 in January? Just over $300.

$300 is equal to almost Rs 12,000. Now thats really not that much is it!!

UPDATE 2 : I just checked again. It’s 5 in the morning, and the site opens up quickly. But surprisingly the home page is about 94KB in size. Our of which about 77KB (82%) are images.

After the home page one needs to go to an index page which is about 13KB in size. Finally you get to the final result page which is about 8KB.

All in all, a user needs to download 115KB to view the result.

This means that we need to edit our calculations, and at the current rate, IIM would require a maximum of about 6550GB of bandwidth.

The sad part is that the small images on the home page, would consume about 4385GB of data.