SHT - User traffic overwhelms Ellis Island web site

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SanFranGate

User traffic overwhelms Ellis Island Web site

Eric Brazil, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, April 20, 2001

The creator of a Web site providing Internet access to Ellis Island immigrant records acknowledged yesterday that it badly underestimated the site's popularity and has had to turn away millions of potential users.

"We did plan on it being popular, but nothing like this," said Peg Zitko, director of public affairs for the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.

The foundation's Web site, www.ellisislandrecords.org, received 50 million visitors in its first six hours of operation, and just 8 million were served, she said.

"We studied other enormous Web events like the launching of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Victoria's Secret and John Glenn's trip to space. We had 10 servers, and we prepared accordingly. We had a terabyte and a half of storage space and state-of-the-art load balancing on the Web servers," Zitko said. "We thought we had redundancy."

Nevertheless, Web traffic pushed the servers to the limit, 100,000 concurrent users. "We're hoping to double that" today, Zitko said. "Now we have three backup servers in play, and Compaq is sending us five more" to get the foundation through its launch, Zitko said.

It was virtually impossible to get access to it in the Bay Area yesterday. Users who signed on to the site received this message: "Thank you for your interest in the American Family Immigration Center. . . . Due to an extraordinary number of visitors, we must limit access to the site. Please keep trying, or check back later."

The foundation's $22.5 million project to create an Internet-accessible database with 22 million records of immigrant arrivals through New York Harbor from 1892 to 1924 took 5 1/2 years to complete.

Volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints put in an estimated 5.6 million hours to transfer the records from 3,700 rolls of microfilm and enter them into the database.

-- Anonymous, April 20, 2001


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