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Subject: [WRIGHT-UK] 1901 census
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 03:35:56 EDT

Hi List.
I took this from another list of which I am a member and I thought some of
you might be interested

The following has come courtesy of one our lister from 'Down Under' - maybe
some of you would like to give it a whirl while the list is in the doldrums.


Census website finally ready to roll
Sunday 18th August 2002
vnunet.com


"Better late than never

The 1901 census website, which contains searchable records for over 32
million people, is finally set to go back online after buckling under
the initial demand.

Launched in January, the site was expecting to receive 1.2 million
hits a day. It instead received more than one million hits an hour,
and was unable to cope.

The Public Record Office (PRO) has been redesigning and testing it
ever since.

Consultants QinetiQ, formerly part of the government-owned Defence and
Evaluation Research Agency, told vnunet.com that the site will be
ready to go live in the next "few weeks".

QinetiQ, which won the £7m contract in 1999, has shouldered the
undisclosed extra costs for the enhancements. Although searches will
remain free it plans to recoup money by charging for services such as
downloading pictures and documents.

"QinetiQ has spent a number of months increasing the robustness and
effectiveness with new hardware, software and functionality, and
testing the service to ensure resilience," said a spokesman.

Limited numbers of users are currently testing the site at the PRO in
Kew and the Family Records Centre in Farringdon so that usage
behaviour can be monitored before it is relaunched nationwide.

Load testing software has successfully simulated volumes in excess of
one million people an hour, and the site has coped with automated
concurrent database searches equivalent to the population of a small
town, according to QinetiQ.

Bandwidth has been increased by a factor of five, database capacity
has been doubled and there are now dedicated instead of shared
firewalls for the site.

QinetiQ admitted that user levels had been 30 times greater than the
site had been designed for in January, but said that it can now cope.

If the search engine becomes overloaded this time, load management
software will divert visitors to a static offline version of the site.
This should ensure that the main census site does not crash under the
demand.

cheers.
Gladys

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