UCAS website collapses - on results day 'A' level students looking to find a university place through the UCAS website had better get on the phone instead - the organisation has shut down its own website. Despite widespread predictions that this year would be a particularly busy clearing process, UCAS (Universities & Colleges Admissions Service) has been caught on …
> Michael Allen, Director of Application Performance Management Solutions at Compuware said: “In this day and age, there’s no reason why increased traffic should cause a website to crash."
Michael Allen, Director of Hasn't Got a F***ing Clue About the Realities of Running a Website
but surely if anything is "crashing", rather than just unavailable due to the number of connections, then its buggy & needs fixing. I don't run webservers, so I don't know - maybe they do crash at the drop of a web connection. But all media outlets *always* state, without exception, that so-and-so's site has "crashed" when its unavailable. Sounds like unmitigated shite to me.
The quote about UCAS being in a good position to predict the traffic seems slightly harsh.
Predications aren't exactly easy to make, presumably student numbers are pretty similar to last year yet the quote from UCAS says they are getting 4x the peak load - would they have been able to predict that? Double maybe, but 4 times?
I don't know exactly how much information UCAS have access to, but they probably know which A levels people are taking, which courses they have applied for, and what offers they received.
Presumably they also knew in advance what grades everyone got.
So they could have known last week exactly how many people failed to secure a place.
A week isn't long. But surely some trends must have been visible for months - more applicants (less people taking a gap year because of the fee increase next year), people applying for more substantial courses which might actually lead to a job (but more difficult to get the grades), etc.
Were all these factors static and the extra traffic came as a bolt out of the blue?
"Importantly for applicants, the ability to choose a Clearing place will not be impacted, and this function will open late afternoon as planned."
Should read
"Importantly for applicants, the ability to choose a Clearing place will not be impacted, and this function will crash later this afternoon as planned."
Unthinkable! according to my customers , hence i look after 500+ Win2k machines that cant have OS upgraded, only have LJ4 print driver installed , require lpt1 "capturing" , and applications that fall over and have to be "unlocked" if there is a millisecond lapse of network connectivity.
All development and coders left years ago.
Well, I for one, would have been more impressed with all these declarations of how easy it was to predict UCAS outages if this article had appeared yesterday rather than with the benefit of hindsight.
Would those commentards that successfully maintain a website that gets hammered one day a year without bankrupting their organisation with excess kit/service charges care to step forward and reveal how they do it?
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