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Priya Ganapati
Anxious students trying to look up examination results online were frustrated by painfully slow responses from government servers this year too.
In fact, most students were unable to access the results pages.
The National Informatics Centre of the Central government runs a cluster of servers that puts up and maintains information for several government organisations. Every year, when NIC plays host to education boards, it struggles to respond to overwhelming traffic on result days.
However, NIC senior system analyst Kamala Kannan said, "They may have not been able to get through for just a short time. We had done sufficient planning to ensure that this year traffic flow is smooth."
When told that students were trying to get through for hours, Kannan insisted, "This is just not possible. We have many monitoring tools at the network and server levels."
However, he conceded, "If simultaneous hits exceed 10,000, the system could slow down considerably, which could be why students experienced difficulties logging in moments after the results were announced."
When asked who should be blamed, Kannan replied, "It is not just network traffic. People are using dial-up connections from various ISPs and sometimes their connections too may be slow. You cannot always say that it is an NIC problem." But he had no explanation as to why the same 'slow connections' could access other sites.
The saving grace, however, is that the NIC received fewer complaints this year, despite a nearly 40 per cent increase in traffic. Kannan refused to reveal the kind of complaints that NIC was bombarded with. "We cannot tell you that, but it is definitely better than last year."
According to NIC's logs, the CBSE results page this year had an average of three million hits per day immediately after the results were declared. The ICSE page did about 2.5 million.
Kannan explained that the NIC's motto is 'smooth and quick connectivity'. However ironic this may sound under the circumstances, NIC has been putting in tremendous efforts.
"We have set up a number of mirror sites whenever we could. For instance, when the Tamil Nadu results were announced, we had four to five mirrors in Tamil Nadu, in addition to two to three servers we had in Delhi. For CBSE, we could not do a similar thing as hits were coming from all over the country," Kannan explained.
About 20 technical staffers work on the results pages of the NIC Web site. A monitoring software, written in-house, also watches the load on the systems and checks to see if the connection is live or not. The output is spewed out constantly, but inspected randomly.
ALSO SEE:
Examination Results Online
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