Are IEBC web servers overstretched by online applications of voter registration clerks?

Are IEBC web servers overstretched by online applications of voter registration clerks?

With the recent advertisement of 2900 vacancies in biometrics voter registration clerks by IEBC in the local dailies, candidates are required to fill an online application form that easy! But to me it had been a nightmare trying to access their website (www.iebc.or.ke), not even applying.
                                                                                                         

The above is the message that welcomed me on typing the IEBC website URL in my browser, since last Sunday, until late Monday at around 9pm in the evening when I managed to access, and may be that was the trick, problem solved! Yes! But may be for then, since it didn’t hold at all, on Tuesday I tried to prove this to my disappointment, this time around I tried until late in the midnight all in vain, this no doubt a true sign of the IEBC web servers amiss.

This is the sample of biometrics voter registration clerks online application form

So let me discuss some probable justification to this IEBC website behavior:-

Heavy Website

This is as a result of poor page, links, JavaScript or image CSS format optimization, use of components in a website that are poorly optimized or existence of unused components in your website among other elements. This can lead to slow loading of a website or not at all especially with a slow Internet connection.

For example an image of 1028 x 628 and 1MB being used as a thumbnail as it is in a website or poor html - not in accordance with w3.org, used for pages or poor headers for links, all this is culminates to poor optimization and will lead to slow loading of the website. The solution to this by validating each element to achieve maximum optimization

So if IEBC problem is due to heaviness - one will need a fast Internet connection I thought to myself - this prompted me to try and access the mobile version of the website - images and that much formatting removed. There are various free mobilizing tools online to do this - Google mobilize, mowser and/or opera mini on pc - in my case I preferred mowser because of its cute formatting feature - but it did work a clear indicator that it wasn’t my slow internet connection maybe the server side.
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A screenshot of the mowser test

Server Limitations

The web server in which a website is hosted needs enough bandwidth which can handle all requests without depletion of services and this comes at a cost of course but it is worth getting professional advise for the best option independent of cost but website requirements before hosting your website.

Using www.ismyblogwoking.com to get some quick statistics of IEBC website and this were the results:?

From the screenshot above IEBC web server was really suffering.

Routing Malfunction

A slow response from a website or web server indicates data packet loss. The larger the number or percentage of packets that are lost during a transmission, the slower the response is from the server that you are accessing. Troubleshoot or fix for this problem is very simple:

1. Establish the Actual Route Using Tracert – native Microsoft Windows command

The first thing in determining data packet loss is documenting the actual route being taken- which routers are currently responsible for the data packet transmission- execution of this command returns a list of the routers and their locations that are used for the data packet transmission. Simply execute this command using any Windows computer system from your location and affix the web server IP address as the parameter - E.g.

C:\>tracert xx.xxx.xxx.xx, where “xx.xxx.xxx.xx” is the IP address of your web server

Screenshot of an example of a sample output using tracert

From the screenshot above we can see the IP address of each router that takes a part in the data packet transmission.

2. Use Windows Ping command

The second step is to use the Windows Ping command to isolate any routers that may be responsible for packet loss. Packet loss is intermittent in nature. Randomly some data packets are successfully transmitted while others are not. We can use the ping command to send a group of test packets and measure the percentage of successful transmissions. The larger the number of test packets being transmitted, the greater the probability that there is packet loss during your test. It also follows that the larger the packet size transmitted, the greater the probability that there is packet loss. The ping command is executed in the following manner:

C:\>ping –n 20 -1 500 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

The above command basically means send 20 data packets, each 500 bytes in size to the IP address of “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx”. In most cases, a byte size of 500 being transmitted 20 times to a given router is significant enough to discover data packet transmission problems - packet loss- if any.

Screenshot of an example of a sample output using ping

Note: The results of your ping tests could be time dependent based on the rate of other traffic passing through these public routers.

Abuse from bots or automated programs

This is a very likely with IEBC website specifically in the application form being used for Biometrics voter registration, I have filled this application form and to my surprise no recapture challenge-that distorted text or images one has to type in a box - for preventing computer programs from applying which may spam the system up and even cause lack of service.

Above is a sample of a recapture challenge