Florida: Voter registration website overwhelmed at deadline

Valdis Kl=?utf-8?Q?=c4=93?=tnieks valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu
Fri Oct 9 10:00:47 UTC 2020


On Wed, 07 Oct 2020 22:10:07 -0700, "Constantine A. Murenin" said:

> 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.

It isn't the stock images and silly front-ends that take all the effort. Those
are pretty damned easy to serve up quickly.

It's the twisty little maze of databases, all different.

You asked for a driver's license number for ID? Well, that just bought you
a call to the DMV's servers to check on the validity/status of that ID.
Vetting the home address gets equally interesting, especially if it's
a PO box or a "suite" at a mailbox-for-rent company.
Vetting the existence of the last employer is going to take time as well.

Are you going to get the unemployment system, the tax system, the DMV
systems, and any others you need to talk to on this "one server"?  Oh, and
don't forget that the systems in the DMV and tax systems almost certainly
have *other* systems they have to talk to....

Don't forget that these state agencies usually don't have the budget
that Amazon or other large commercial organizations have, so you're looking
at a *really* high chance that some server in the Department of Revenue
isn't sized big/fast enough, so verifying the employer's existence hangs, so
the front end hangs....

On top of all that, even if you're only a *little* bit too slow clearing requests,
you end up sitting on a big pile of pending requests, which sucks up memory..
Get 305 requests per second, clear 304 per second, and in a few minutes
you're throwing '502 Gateway Error' left right and center because things are
wedged up....

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