THE ANALYSIS – Scalability, infrastructures compared: the Rousseau m5s platform Vs Fantagazzetta Leagues
“Our house was defended like a fortress,” said Beppe Grillo in the aftermath of the online vote that marked the beginning of the race for the premiership of the vice president of the Chamber of Deputies Luigi Di Maio. But are we really sure that the 5-star vote was a triumph? Beyond the political analysis, which is not for us to talk about, online voting was a flop. This is because as soon as the members began to vote, the Rousseau platform came to a standstill amid strong protests from the grassroots.
“The system made me vote but crashed soon after. He told me, “Impossible to make a connection.” However, when I exited the browser and re-entered, the “thank you for voting” screen appeared. All this at 5.30 pm yesterday, but the confirmation email arrived only at 1:16 tonight. What’s going on?“. This is just one of the many comments from angry or simply skeptical users.
“You can’t vote,” users kept commenting. “Too many accesses” are justified. It is true that the platform was not accessible to voters for more than two hours and so it was decided to extend the closing date of voting first at 11 p.m., then at 12 a.m. the next day.
But what was the reason for the down? Too much turnout. With 140,000 registered users , it is not normal for a national site to collapse under the weight of a click, especially considering that there are scalable architectures that allow you to increase and decrease the number of servers available for the service.
Suffice it to give a virtuous example, that of one of the fantacalcio.it apps hosted on a single infrastructure. For example, during the fifth day of the championship, there were 315,129 unique users at the same time on the Leghe Fantagazzetta app. Not to mention the other seven applications that have at least 100,000 users. This is thanks to the scalability of the infrastructure created by VMEngine Cloud Architects and the software developed by Quadronica. Perhaps this is also the key to Fantagazzetta’s success: the combination of a bulletproof architecture and a “closed” software, therefore developed without sparing any expense.
Rousseau’s engineers had therefore not done proper planning of the user load. The numbers speak for themselves: 315,129,000 users of fantagazzetta compared to 30,000 for Rouseau. It has to be said: there was no match.
