How (not) enroll children in school in Petersburg

I don’t know how in other cities, but in the cultural capital of our wonderful Motherland there is annual entertainment - somewhere at the turn of winter and spring children enroll in the first class (about 50,000 people). Theoretically, all children will definitely get a place in school, but no one guarantees that the school will be the one you want. Since, according to the anecdote, there are <many> intelligentsia, but few places, some collisions occur.

In the old days, the question was resolved simply - for a day, or even more, a line of caring parents began to line up near each school, suffering to enroll a child in this school. Time passed in a fun way - with bonfires, songs and warming drinks. Someone, they say, even ordered a bus, so that was where it is comfortable to snooze. However, civilization is inexorably striding even on our side of the planet, leading to the introduction of various innovations. Such were the record through the MFC (Multi-Functional Centers - citywide centers for interaction of citizens and various government services, the “one-stop-shop” system) and the portal of electronic state services.

Last year was the last year when it was possible to enroll directly at the school. This year, the recording took place only through the state portal. services and in the MFC. Some impressive person from the St. Petersburg government authoritatively stated that

1. Numerous problems of the past years in the work of the portal have been eliminated, a lot of funds have been mastered, the system has been tested under the expected load and everything will be nishtyak - use the portal, and the MFC for those unfamiliar with the computer.
2. By submitting through the portal, you can fill in all the data in advance, and at hour X, you can only press the “send” button.
3. The portal and the MFC will use a single point of entry into the system, therefore, through the Internet it will be much faster than through an operator in the queue at the MFC.

So, the day came on February 1, with an hour X, scheduled for 9 am. Our people are gullible, that something went wrong, many began to suspect only in the morning when the site became very thoughtful, and by half past eight they had completely died. The most savvy immediately reached out to the MFC, where they met people (some started forming a queue in 3 days), who were better at studying the history of their native country ...
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The final alignment was this:

• Everything worked perfectly at the MFC, but the capacity was limited by the number of employees and the need to enter all the data from the documents.
• The portal lay in the morning and hours until 13, then not responding, then giving something like [Bitrix \ Main \ DB \ ConnectionException] Mysql connect error: Too many connections (400). In the future, the portal somewhat wore out and the work went.
• Some of the lucky ones could still get through to the record through the portal, but did not find any pre-filled applications and were forced to enter everything anew. The cries of “Diversion!” Began to be heard. However, it’s not known for certain about the lucky ones themselves whether they are writing to Olgino .
• By lunch, a statement was made by a no less authoritative official (or the same one who will disassemble them there?) That the portal faced a load from abroad that was much higher than the calculated one (a hint of a ddos ​​attack?); The MFC used a different mechanism to communicate with the recording system and did not encounter any problems. Pre-filled applications did not disappear anywhere, simply could not be loaded from some other system due to the same problems.

The question is brought up for public discussion - how to organize a system that will be guaranteed to experience “habraeffekt” once a year, practically staying idle the rest of the time. I remind you that the expected number of users is about 50,000. If there is no general solution within the framework of the historical process, I would like at least a private decision - why does someone make his way through the habra effect and manage to go through a dozen steps to work with the site, and the other sees only the running circle and “ Connection timed out. Exclusively random or may be some tricks?

If suddenly someone participated in today's marathon personally - I will be glad to hear comments. I, fortunately, looked at the topic in a somewhat detached way - as the person to whom it will be in the future.