Ask HN: Why can't the UK Gov petition site scale to use?

3 points

7 years ago

So throughout the day, there has been a huge rush on the petition to stop UK exiting the EU, and we've seen a lot of gateway 503 errors (the default nginx page), and "down for maintenance" pages - and I was wondering if anyone could shed any light as to how it has been so hard for them to cope with scaling...

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584

Article about the crashes:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-petition-revoke-article-50-theresa-may-deal-extension-a8832851.html

Traffic has been about 2000 users / minute I believe, and users each get sent an email, and then have to click a confirmation link - and you can see the current number of signatories so I guess they are probably looking at more like 4 - 5000 users peak across a minute so hundreds of thousands an hour roughly.

They also have JSON api that various people are querying `curl https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584/count.json`

What I really want to know is, why could they not just "turn up the juice"?

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