EC website slows down amid huge traffic

As results of the Lok Sabha elections poured in, the website of the Election Commission of India on Saturday touched a massive one lakh hits per second, slowing it down for a while.

The website www.eciresults.nic.in failed to respond around 9 am despite promises from the electoral body that it would provide an efficient update. However, it recovered an hour later, but was still functioning slowly.

"There were as many as one lakh hits per second in the first half an hour leading to the slowing down of the website," deputy election commissioner Alok Shukla said.

He said because of the traffic congestion the website might have slowed down initially, but it has picked up as it has been braced up by the National Informatics Centre to take millions of hits at a go.

Promising to post fast and accurate results, the commission had upgraded and redesigned its website to include graphic details and pie charts.

However, people logging in to have an initial picture, were in for a disappointment as the website failed to respond.

"The traffic was enormously large in the first half an hour but Election Commission has done a massive upgradation of its servers to ensure a smooth functioning and handling of the massive traffic," Shukla said.

The Election Commission had on Friday said that it had installed four new servers of 16 gigabyte RAM each with a connectivity speed of 35 megabyte per second (Mbps) to prevent the website from slowing down due to increasing hits.  Earlier it had one server of eight gigabyte RAM.

Also, five servers of same capacity were installed to handle the traffic at the speed of 100 Mbps at NIC, with one server handling the database, Shukla said, adding the website had been tested for 30 lakh hits at a given point of time.