‘Gauteng education website can withstand stress’

Gauteng (South Africa). — The Gauteng education department was this week confident that the province’s new online school registration system would now withstand the stress of the thousands of frustrated parents who have been trying to register their children since last week. But a software developer said that the problems with the site could have been avoided if the proper tests had been conducted beforehand.Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi said the Tuesday morning relaunch of the site’ which crashed under the volume of traffic last week’ was delayed because IT staff realised the system was going to crash again. The server could not handle the traffic.

The department then approached Vodacom to host the site and ensure it can process up to 20 000 hits per second. It previously processed 3 500 hits a second.

More than 5 300 parents applied for placement within the first 10 minutes after the website’s relaunch’ Mr Lesufi said’ and the system was still going strong.

He said 30 000 people were recorded trying to log in to the system on Tuesday morning. Mr Lesufi said the site launch was also delayed because of a problem with the GPS co-ordinates that were meant to ascertain an applicant’s position and the schools nearby.

Department spokesman Oupa Bodibe said the site was developed in-house and hosted by the State Information Technology Agency (Sita).

Jaco van den Berg’ MD of software development company softGRID’ said the expected traffic volume of a website — the number of people expected to access it at any specific time — would be discussed in the planning phase of development.

He said developers would ensure during the development stage that the site could handle the volume of traffic expected.

Mr van den Berg said the volume should not have come as a surprise to the department as it would have had a rough estimate of the number of pupils expected to be registered when it started working on the system.

Stress-testing was also a crucial step in developing a system’ Mr van den Berg said. This involves testing it with the expected volumes and adding 20 percent to be confident the application and infrastructure can handle the expected volume.

Any faults in the system would be discovered at this point’ he said.

Mr van den Berg said the stress test would also reveal the requirements for hosting the site and a hosting service provider would then be able to ensure it could deal with the capacity. – TMG Digital.