Florida: Voter registration website overwhelmed at deadline

Eric Litvin eric at lumaoptics.net
Thu Oct 8 05:20:44 UTC 2020


This is a great F’in email,  Sean!  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 7, 2020, at 10:10 PM, Constantine A. Murenin <mureninc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.


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