…..Which is on the BBC homepage today. You are meant to be able to put in your postcode and get a local map of crime in your area.

Anybody actually gotten it to do anything other than look at you with a blank page???

Tried on and off since this morning but it’s next to useless. I guess it’s to do with heavy traffic on the first day of the site but by god it’s annoying.

Interesting idea assuming it ever works……

same as you, tried over and over, nuffink. busy first day i’m guessing

I had a blank page for about 5 minutes then got a message that there was no data available for my postcode. I can only assume that it has been stolen.

Yeah tried three addresses failed on all of them.

tried over and over, nuffink.

Yep, me too.

All stolen? Crime is rife!

The government clearly want us all to hide under our beds in terror only emerging to pay our taxes and to put our bins out for the monthly collection.

Apparently this website has cost £300,000.

Apparently there is no police force covering my Central London postcode….

Which is a little scary.

As above, assume it’s just due to very high traffic.

I see some peoples property values dropping….

Apparently this website has cost £300,000.

but i’m sure they did one about 18 months ago. and that too fell over!!

What is the point of it other than to worry people?

worked fine for me this morning

Just said on my local news one of the streets with the highest number of recorded crimes in the uk has a major police call centre on it 😯 and crimes phoned in with no address given are recorded against the call centre address!! 😆

I can understand it falling over today and for a couple of days. No point in setting up a website that can handle that many requests for 3 days and then never have to again leaving a load of hardware unused. Can’t say as I see the point in it either though!

Manchester doesn’t exist and nor does crime.

Website Fail.

Well the DNS resloves to an Amazon AWS site so it looks like the cloud may not be holding up to well.

Time to start looting then……

It’s getting 5 million hits an hour, apparently. Give it a couple of days for the demand to die down and them to pop some more servers in

Worked fine for me earlier 🙂

This happens every time they try to launch this sort of site (like the electoral register one a couple of years ago).

Why on earth they don’t soft-launch and trickle the PR via news streams rather than having MPs on Breakfast TV etc saying how wonderful it is – would any server be able to cope with the sort of demand that sort of PR can generate?

Damn stoopid.

I spose it depends on how you went about it. If you were renting cloudspace rather than a single server, I guess there are contracts where you can fairly quickly scale-up and down size to meet demand.
But I’m just making it up as I go along really 🙂

There is one very knackered Hamster in their server…

Next big launch will be the census site, wonder how that one will cope?

Ha ha, they got slashdotted!

I spose it depends on how you went about it. If you were renting cloudspace rather than a single server, I guess there are contracts where you can fairly quickly scale-up and down size to meet demand.
But I’m just making it up as I go along really

Yeah you would think so, but the level of demand in such a short timeframe would surely make anything fall over.

The minute I saw the news piece I wondered to myself how long it would take to implode.

how hard can it be to divvy up database requests to a big pile of database replicas dotted around the interweb* so that new sites dont collapse in a puddle of stale hamster wee within 10 minutes of launching. Then turn the database volume down from 11 to 2 for the next 3 years until the website is scrapped.

Happens everytime.

* technical phrase I believe.

how hard can it be to divvy up database requests

To hard for the hard of thinking that thought this was a good idea in the first place.

This info’ has been available via most police force websites for about 18 mths:

http://maps.police.uk/m/

Now what they should have done is announced it as they have, but not turned the servers on. Wait a week then turn them on. The results would have been the same and the Government would have saved some money on the leccy bill.

The data previously available was not at street level, this site shows much more local detail (or so I’m led to believe, not actually seen it)

http://maps.police.uk/m/

wherever you live in England or Wales

Not UK is it? 🙄

It’s not so difficult to make the website resilient enough to handle all the traffic but it will cost you. Bandwidth, processing and space pricing goes up exponentially so whats the point in paying £100,000’s for computing power that is only needed for a few days when a site first goes live. We would all then be slaging them off for wasting money. Cloud computing can be up and down scaled quickly but the companies that provide it are not stupid and charge a fortune if you want the capacity and especially if you want it quickly. To be honest it is just a fact of life at the moment and especially when a new service goes live and demand is going to spike for a few days. Even the likes of Apple and Microsoft have problems like this when they release new software updates. When Apple released FaceTime for the Mac the webpage didn’t work for days.

worked for me, but not really very informative.

Give it a few days to calm down, and look at it then. Bound to happen; just like when Stephen Fry links to a site on Twitter.

They should have limited the searches to a few postcodes initially, then increased the limit.

If you search for EC2… you get a _static_ page, saying your postcode is not searchable yet.

If you search for EC1… you get the correct search results.

Opening access for all postcodes in one shot was asking for trouble..

It’s not so difficult to make the website resilient enough to handle all the traffic but it will cost you. Bandwidth, processing and space pricing goes up exponentially so whats the point in paying £100,000’s for computing power that is only needed for a few days when a site first goes live. We would all then be slaging them off for wasting money. Cloud computing can be up and down scaled quickly but the companies that provide it are not stupid and charge a fortune if you want the capacity and especially if you want it quickly. To be honest it is just a fact of life at the moment and especially when a new service goes live and demand is going to spike for a few days. Even the likes of Apple and Microsoft have problems like this when they release new software updates. When Apple released FaceTime for the Mac the webpage didn’t work for days.

Good point.

Which leads me back to my original point
Why on earth they don’t soft-launch and trickle the PR via news streams rather than having MPs on Breakfast TV etc saying how wonderful it is
Then they never get the spike in traffic but users are still informed.

Why on earth they don’t soft-launch and trickle the PR via news streams rather than having MPs on Breakfast TV etc saying how wonderful it is

Ego. The person who “made it happen” want to get their mug on the telly and take the credit.

http://www.raisingfearofcrime.com, awesome.

Cloud computing can be up and down scaled quickly but the companies that provide it are not stupid and charge a fortune if you want the capacity and especially if you want it quickly.

Well… they’re using Amazon Web Services, which charges a flat rate per server “instance” per hour, regardless of how many you need, and they’re available instantly. It’s actually pretty affordable for a short period. A fairly chunky server costs about $0.30 an hour to run. They also have an auto scaling service that’ll allocate as many server instances as you need based on demand. This means you can cope with a high profile Slashdot/Digg/BBC News homepage spot comfortably with the right planning. In webmonkey land, we often have to cope with this kind of intense spike for short periods (during and after a TV ad, for example)… </dayjob>

Bloody hell crime rate is rather high around my area … 🙄

Working for me today – just a couple of anti-social behaviour reports showing up. Ironically one is directly outside the house my brother has just moved into…