House of Representatives’ web infrastructure not scalable
With all of the madness of the markets and the Bush Administration’s $700 billion (bare minimum, of course) bailout fiasco, CNN reports that the website of the House of Representatives has been overwhelmed. This is slightly amusing because I actually used the site this past Friday on 20080926 and noticed the abysmal performance. And by “abysmal” I mean the page for Jay Inslee, representative for the Seattle area, took about 8 tries and 4 minutes to load.
I was, of course, doing what many others were doing at the time and emailing my representatives to vote a big, fat NO on more of Bush’s big, fat failed policies.
Bush: This is a grave situation and requires that you, the American people, give me and my administration more power.
But I digress. More to the point of this post, the House of Representatives must have a pretty crappy web infrastructure. Check out this graph from Alexa showing two sites: house.gov and kodak.com over the past year. You can see what is probably Kodak’s Christmas bump but other than the huge spike from the past few days on the House’s site, they’re pretty close. And c’mon who goes to Kodak’s website?
From the Alexa graph, you can see that maybe the House’s traffic tripled or quadrupled. Hell even if you’re generous and say it peaked at 10 times normal load, that’s a pretty sad infrastructure that can’t handle 10 times your average load. Ten times normal load and you’d have a graph like this; more like if you threw woot.com into the picture. And Woot’s users are religious who by definition are driven to visit the site once a day.
Alexa’s data is by no means perfect, but it’s close enough for these purposes. The CNN article linked above has some funny gems:
“This is unprecedented,” said Jeff Ventura, communications director for the House’s chief administrator.
…
Ventura compared the situation to the “old days, when you listened to a radio show and the 10th caller got a toaster. Then everyone calls the same 1-800 number at the same time and all you got was a busy signal.”
“This was a massive digital busy signal,” he said.
Thanks for that explanation and, no, it’s not “unprecedented.” Websites get overwhelmed all the time. What is kinda unprecedented is constituents actually giving a shit about what’s going on in the world. The massive signal here is that your website sucks and can’t handle any load. Now in all fairness, this could simply be a function of bandwidth, but I doubt it. By the time you’re sustaining reasonable traffic, the load on your systems is already higher. Hire some engineers to fix your site 
I’m also particularly tickled by their solution:
“This morning, our engineers sounded the alarms … and we have installed a digital version of a traffic cop. We enacted stopgaps that we planned for last night. We had hoped we didn’t have to.”
Now, when House.gov or individual members’ sites begin to get overloaded, a message will come up on the computer screen saying, in effect, “try back later,” Ventura said.
Now that is innovation. At least they don’t appear to be running crappy, bloated Microsoft software:
Server: "USHR Webserver Ver 5.4.1"
Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:10:16 GMT
Content-length: 13429
Content-type: text/html
WWW-authenticate: Basic realm="Sun ONE Web Server"