[LINK] RFI: Census Site Implosion

[Tom Worthington]

On 09/08/16 21:00, Roger Clarke wrote:

> ... comprehensiveness of the debacle ...

Perhaps the ABS staff need to go down to the foyer of their building and 
break the glass on the display case, with the punch card machine in it. 
I used a machine like that thirty years ago to write programs for the 
Census and it worked fine. ;-)

But seriously, I had a call from ABC Canberra this morning about the ABS 
announcing they had suffered denial of service attacks from overseas: 
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/09/the-great-australian-census-fail-of-2016-website-crashes-under-load

Keep in mind this is not a safety critical system: no lives are 
endangered. People can fill it in tomorrow, or the day after, or get a 
paper form. But the minister needs to be asked if sufficient resources 
were given to the ABS and were they allowed to use their preferred 
method of data collection, which would be surveys, not a census.

At 9:50pm Census night I tried the ABS site at 10pm and still got:

"Thank you for participating in the Census. The system is very busy at 
the moment. Please wait for 15 minutes before trying again. Your 
patience and cooperation are appreciated. [code 9]"

The Census error message web page is 117 Kbytes, with 49 Kbytes of 
Javascript and 52 Kbytes of CSS, which seems a bit much just to display 
a few hundred characters of error message. But presumably this code is 
cached and reused throughout (in which case, it is not too large). The 
CSS uses Pure v0.5.0 http://www.w3resource.com/pure/

ps: My comments on the 2006 eCensus: 
http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/ecensus/


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Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
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