"Russian Public Initiative" under the onslaught of Habr and LJ. [UPD]

On April 2, 2013, the Russian Public Initiative (ROI) website was launched. The ROI is a “mechanism of public presentation and voting on the proposals of citizens of the Russian Federation on the Internet.”

Yesterday the article Voting was published on the ROI's state portal for “Making a change to the work of the Russian Post” , and the day before an article in the LiveJournal of an oppositionist was published (I don’t give a link so as not to provoke political clashes in comments) .

Foreword

It became interesting to observe the dynamics of voting, as well as to see whether the new e-government website will cope with the influx of people eager to cast their vote. Therefore, I quickly wrote the ROI parser with the results of voting for the most popular initiatives. And for easy information display, he made a website with charts on Highcharts.

Unfortunately, I started collecting statistics after the publication of the above article on Habré, but fortunately, I was contacted by shara and sent my data (added 11 hours). So thanks to him, you can now observe the influence of Habraeffect on voting in the ROI.
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First monitoring results

If the ROI site was still coping with the influx of LiveJournal users, the connection also harassed the site.

At 9:20 MSK, the site began to be very stupid and even though the site itself opened, but users had massive problems with authorization, and therefore the voices almost ceased to be added. Perhaps the site of public services, through which the authorization was carried out. The problems lasted almost 1 hour, after which the voting continued in the normal mode.

The second fall was already serious. At 6:35 MSK had already started to blunt the site, the pages were given away with a long delay, and periodically there were timeouts. The torture continued until 7:20 MSK, after which the server went offline for almost 2 hours until 8:55 MSK.

Habraeffekt

Naturally in this case habraeffekt not in a pure form, as users LJ actively helped. But the trend is clearly visible. It was after the publication of the article on Habré that the initiative on the Post of Russia quickly began to catch up with competitors, and in just over a day, moved from fifth to third place.



You can follow the dynamics of voting on the Russian Public Initiative (ROI) website on your own, and of course do not forget to vote for your favorite initiatives .

PS The site of the ROI, as it is written in the news, is still in test mode, so let's hope we will deal with the stability of the work. By the way, if their representatives are on Habré, correct the page with search results - it writes the number of votes per hour (although the data for the month).

UPD. Well done, the error on the search page was corrected fairly quickly.

UPD 2. Comments from the representative of the ROI

It turned out that ROI representatives not only come to Habré, but even sent interesting comments to the article. I am pleased to publish the comments of Alexander Kuznetsov (@Alexzander), Deputy Director of the Information Democracy Development Department.

Resource ROI was launched in test mode on April 2, April 15, we transfer it to the industrial mode of operation.
For two weeks, large statistics was collected on visits, load, requests to servers, etc. On the basis of it, on the 12th and 13th of the day, planned work was carried out to optimize the work of memcached server (caching algorithms). Considering the large amount of dynamic data, a multi-level caching system was applied: for more or less static pages (example: on the main page the data is updated every 10 minutes) full page caching is used, for pages with dynamic content (example: the personal account page contains individual information on submitted initiatives, initiatives for which the user has voted, etc.) are component-wisely caching page elements.

During the work, the system did not turn off, its total performance was simply decreasing, which was higher than the average (clearly visible on the graph, several additional graphs can be downloaded in the archive ), but due to the active increase in users, some of them could not get to the site.


On April 14, at lunch, scheduled work on the main router and installation of a hardware load balancer are scheduled, during this period the resource will be completely unavailable for 10-20 minutes.

Now about the load:

The surge of visits was recorded at 2:28 pm April 11, the peak was 948 hits per minute, which is 4-6% of the estimated maximum possible attendance.

After that, the load gradually decreased, there were no additional peaks, at the moment the attendance has leveled out taking into account standard daily fluctuations.

In total on the initiative of www.roi.ru/poll/petition/gosudarstvennoe_upravlenie1/zapret-chinovnikam-i-sotrudnikam-kompanij-s-gosudarstvennym-munitcipalnym-uchastiem-priobetat-legkovye-avtomobi-our account , which you will be in our account , who will be in our account , who will be in our account , who will be in our account , and you will be able to apply this. the site of about 90 thousand users, on the initiative of www.roi.ru/poll/petition/problemy-potrebitelej-i-plohoj-servis/vnesenie-izmenenie-v-rabotu-pochty-rossii - 13 thousand users.

Visits with LJ


Visits from Habra

I clarified about the presence of the API - it is present, but at this stage is not available to all. Also in the next release of the system many nice features are planned (short links, QR codes, filters, etc.)