Election Diary: Day 3.5

Well, that seemed to work. The first poll reported a 7:01 p.m. and the last result went online at 9:28 p.m., so it was all over in about two and a half hours. By comparison, back in 2003 the first poll came in at 7:09 p.m. and the last one came in at 9:23 p.m.

The webserver performed well: at the peak load it was responding to just over 13 requests a second. The load average on the server never tipped over 1.3 all night long, and we had more than enough bandwidth to go around. Just goes to show that stripped down Apache, serving out HTML files, can do an awful lot without breaking a sweat.

Google Analytics is churning through traffic data as I write, so I should have some actual traffic numbers sometime tomorrow; the raw Apache logfile is 114MB.

As in previous elections, after the initial trickle of advance polls, data entry became a sea of numbers and I lost my ability to attach any meaning to what I was typing. Fortunately this time I had brother Johnny sharing the workload, so it was never as frantic as it was in the heat of 2000 and 2003.

It was a pleasure to work again with Elections PEI: Lowell and Norma and all their staff know elections cold, and they managed the entire event with aplomb.

Off to bed so I can get up at 4:30 a.m. and fly to Switzerland ;-)

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