from Hacker News

UK Parliament petitions site crashes under traffic for petition to cancel Brexit

by Jamie452 on 3/21/19, 9:27 AM with 244 comments

  • by colinramsay on 3/21/19, 10:00 AM

    These petitions are almost always met with a boilerplate response. There was a recent one (which I can't find as the site's currently down) regarding Russian interference in the last UK election, with the government response being along the lines of "we don't know what you're talking about, move on". More on that here:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/b2vmm0/gover...

    While the huge number of signings on this petition obviously does reflect _something_, I'm not sure it's actually doing anything meaningful. Likewise the upcoming march this weekend for a Peoples Vote:

    https://www.peoples-vote.uk/march

    These are now simply ignored. The sheer stubbornness of Theresa May's position as evidenced by her statement last night means we're going to go to the wire on something that's been worked on for years. People calling it a national disgrace are absolutely correct.

    I can only hope that the pressure exerted from various angles (petition, march, sane MPs) will result in Parliament revoking Article 50, but I don't see it happening. It would be too prudent for this parody of a political system.

    edit: the site's back now. Apparently it runs on Rails with DelayedJob doing most of the grunt work in the background.

    edit2: just found the most popular petition on there with over 4m votes and absolutely nothing came of that:

    https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/131215

  • by jonplackett on 3/21/19, 10:12 AM

    Petitions for Brexit are completely pointless.

    We already know half the country wants to leave and half wants to stay, so unless that petition has more than 33 million signatures then it doesn't prove much does it.

    (FYI: I voted remain and think Brexit is completely dumb, but it doesn't change how pointless petitions are for subjects where it's well established what people's opinions are)

  • by douglasfshearer on 3/21/19, 9:57 AM

    One of the developers tweeted last night "...nowhere near crashing the site - you all need to try harder tomorrow"

    https://twitter.com/pixeltrix/status/1108518184301268995

  • by ariehkovler on 3/21/19, 10:11 AM

    Hey, that's my tweet!

    At the time it went down, I was seeing 2k signups a minute and rising. I was just thinking how the load handling was impressive when poof it was down.

    Back now, though, which is also pretty good. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584

    UPDATE: It's down again. 502 bad gateway. I was seeing close to 3k signups a minute when it fell over this time.

    UPDATE 2: Seems to be back? Clearly unstable though with these load levels.

  • by franky47 on 3/21/19, 10:00 AM

    I made a progress bar with React to compare it to the NoDeal petition, for when the JSON endpoints come back up:

    https://brexit-petitions-count.now.sh/

  • by jlokier on 3/21/19, 12:51 PM

    This morning, the petition was getting about 60 signatures per second. I extrapolated it would reach about 1.15 million by noon. The rate was quite steady, and had accelerated gradually.

    Then the site started crashing, and it slowed drastically (between 502 Bad Gateway nginx errors :-), at one point one signature in several minutes.

    Then it resumed, but only at 20/s, and intermittently.

    Now it is clocking up again, but at about 30/s.

    It's impossible to be sure, but with this abrupt change of rates, I think it very likely the outage is continuing to affect many people trying to sign it, and will have a significant effect on the total number of signatures that are achieved.

  • by mhw on 3/21/19, 10:28 AM

    "Well done everyone - the site crashed because calculating the trending count became too much of a load on the database but we're back now at around 180k per hour by my estimation."

    https://twitter.com/pixeltrix/status/1108673644660699136

  • by johnnycab on 3/21/19, 12:45 PM

    We already had a robust set of tools in our technology stack to help us scale. Our primary tool is a combination of Amazon CloudFormation and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which we use to automatically deploy and scale instances in response to demand. Backing these instances is a PostgreSQL RDS database which acts as our primary data store. One other component in our stack is Amazon ElastiCache, a key-value store configured with the open-source Memcached engine, which caches generated fragments of HTML so we can speed up page build times.

    https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/08/16/scaling-the-petiti...

    Perhaps, a petition is required to employ a new Cloud Architect, as this is not the first time the Petitions service has had to cope with extra traffic & spew out 502 Bad Gateway error.

  • by corobo on 3/21/19, 10:04 AM

    This will result in nothing more than a response of

    "The Government’s policy is not to revoke Article 50. Instead, we continue to work with Parliament to deliver a deal that ensures we leave the European Union as planned"

    I have signed, however. Prove me wrong, UK Govt

  • by xhruso00 on 3/21/19, 11:02 AM

    Damage has been done and all the EU institutions are on leave and won't come back. Even if UK delays the leave it won't save them from damage that has been done.

    It's only the politicians now who are trying to save their reputation. Sadly, they are willing to sacrifice country well-being to remain be seen as heroes.

    Britain already has "special status"[1] that was given to it in before referendum. No other country in EU has such a deal.

    [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35622105

  • by rjmunro on 3/21/19, 10:06 AM

    They seem to have fixed it by removing the "popular petitions" section from the home page.

    I guess it's possible that there are no popular petitions in the last hour because of the outage.

  • by billpg on 3/21/19, 9:53 AM

    Link to petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584

    Currently... "Petitions is down for maintenance. We know about it and we're working on it. Please try again later."

  • by huffmsa on 3/21/19, 10:31 AM

    The chance to "petition" was before the vote happened in 2016.

    You've made your bed, time to sleep in it.

  • by nytesky on 3/21/19, 10:29 AM

    I know much of UK wants to remain, and Brexit is a mess, with EU Japan-ification and inherent mismatch of fiscal policy with monetary policy b/c of sovereign states, maybe UK will ultimately come out ahead as economic free agent?

  • by albertgoeswoof on 3/21/19, 11:01 AM

  • by Jamie452 on 3/21/19, 10:07 AM

  • by buboard on 3/21/19, 10:01 AM

    will there be a "reinvoke article 50" after this?

  • by cal97g on 3/21/19, 10:33 AM

    let me know when they get to 17.4 million signatures.

  • by laurent123456 on 3/21/19, 10:36 AM

    It worked for me on the third attempt to submit, but I didn't get the confirmation email, so probably that's down as well.

  • by Simulacra on 3/21/19, 11:23 AM

    If I recall correctly, is not the invoking of Article 50 non-revocable?

  • by AndrewDucker on 3/21/19, 10:02 AM

    Just worked for me. It's clearly intermittent.

  • by ReptileMan on 3/21/19, 11:19 AM

    Am I the only one that finds the ECJ decision that UK can unilaterally decide to stay deeply wrong and offensive? This is absurd.

    You announce to leave there should be no going back.

  • by vectorEQ on 3/21/19, 10:07 AM

    lets base our decisions and policies on internet polls. it's 2019 yolo

  • by _pmf_ on 3/21/19, 10:20 AM

    It's a sign from above that you should respect the valid vote for "leave".

  • by cal97g on 3/21/19, 10:35 AM

    Somebody let me know if they reach 17,400,000 signatures; because if they don't it's completely irrelevant. Not that signatures can't be faked; which seems much more likely.