Florida: Voter registration website overwhelmed at deadline

Thu Oct 8 05:10:07 UTC 2020

On 06/10/2020, Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> wrote:
>
> Florida has had notoriously unreliable state I.T. infrastructure for
> years. Florida's unemployment websites were broken for months during the
> Spring 2020 COVID unemployment demand surge.  So its very likely crappy
> state I.T. infrastructure problems being stressed by high volume.
>
>
> Florida voting age population (2016): 15,839,713
> Florida registered voters (2016): 12,863,773
> Florida registered voters (2019): 13,536,830
>
> Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee, who oversees the voting system,
> said the online registration system “was accessed by an unprecedented 1.1
> million requests per hour” during the last few hours of Monday.

People act like 1.1 million requests per hour is a huge number.

That's only 305 requests per second!

Cheapest NVMe SSDs are capable of 160k+ IOPS.

You can literally serve the whole thing from a single server on a
100Mbps line, if you design it properly, and don't waste bandwidth on
stock images and silly front-ends.

Add a T1 to do replication on the side to an off-site location.

100 Mbit/s / 305 req/s = 40 KiloBytes/req -- should be enough to
display/process any form; and you can even get higher speeds on a 5G
mobile phone these days;

1.5 Mbit/s / 305 req/s = 0.6 KByte/req -- should be enough to
replicate each registration; and why are we even talking about T1 in
2020?!

Keep in mind that 1Gbps (e.g., 1000Mbit/s) is pretty much a minimum
these days, so, you'd either have plenty of extra room to spare, or
can do way more than an average of 1.1 million requests per hour.  A
Google search reveals you can even get 10 Gbps transit for only
$900/mo from he.net these days, for example.

P.S. At least here you may have to collect and distribute unique
information to each visitor; but what excuse did PG&E had in 2019 when
they couldn't distribute non-unique information about the preemptive
power shutoffs that they've had about one year ago now?!

What I'm always curious about, is how many servers do they actually
have, and just how unreasonable do their numbers look when you lay it
all out.  You'd think paying a few mils to design the system could
actually make it work properly when the time comes.  Or are they
somehow not aware that they have 16M voters, everyone always doing
everything in the last minute?!

C.