from Hacker News

Gov.uk site broke Google realtime analytics during lockdown announcement

by whyleyc on 1/4/21, 9:30 PM with 75 comments

• by dazzawazza on 1/4/21, 10:30 PM

  There are a lot of things to complain about in the UK but the digital services bit of the UK government is really well run.

  Congratulations on riding out the thundering herd.

• by jimnotgym on 1/4/21, 11:34 PM

  If Boris had given out at least a basic summary of what the new rules mean I would have stayed off the website.

  A better speechwriter could have saved a huge amount of bandwidth

• by whyleyc on 1/4/21, 10:14 PM

  Estimated that >1% of the UK population (769K) were concurrently on the site before GA topped out.

• by random5634 on 1/5/21, 12:11 AM

  If folks think this load broke analytics please think again. Is there no critical thinking left out there in journalism? Do folks understand the scale analytics operates at?

  Some quick questions

  Did they actually pay for analytics 360?

  If not, did they do 10 million hits in a month for a property? if so - they may be over the limit of 10 million / month.

  More on differences here: https://blog.littledata.io/2018/02/28/google-analytics-360-v...

  Analytics 360 runs 12K+/month from memory, but someone probably has more recent info.

• by 2Gkashmiri on 1/5/21, 4:28 AM

  This might be awkward for some but can governments be compelled to use Foss software and where a Foss software is lacking features, fund for development of that feature so that everyone benefits instead of lacing more and more reliance on proprietary tech which inturn forces citizens to use that proprietary junk because "compatibility"?

• by divbzero on 1/5/21, 8:31 PM

  “Out of the 17M page requests made between 8–9pm (111M if you include assets: stylesheets, images, etc), we served 21 5xx errors.” [1]

  [1]: https://twitter.com/therealnooshu/status/1346419468151488512

• by alexmcc81 on 1/4/21, 10:51 PM

  Am I the only one who thinks it's creepy that the largest advertising company in the world, and particularly one based outside the country, has so much data on what UK citizens access on their own government websites for health, tax, social welfare information etc?

• by 1f60c on 1/4/21, 10:16 PM

  Why did it break?

• by altrunox on 1/5/21, 12:17 AM

  Is that much?

  He said they got around 88k RPS.

  I did a quick benchmark another day, I'm hosting my blog at the Digital Ocean App Plataform, in the free tier, used Locust with some VMs in Azure to stress test it, managed to hit 20k RPS and the only issue I had was that the my VMs at Azure were hitting memory limits...

  Doesn't look impressive at all, weird that GA broke.