NEA Website Overloading - A Simple Solution

During the recent haze problem some forest fires in Indonesia, many Singaporeans were using the NEA website to check the PSI readings. As a result, the website became overloaded and this caused a lot of unhappiness amongst users.

In response to a complain letter, the NEA posted this reply to the Today newspaper:

We refer to Mr Lam Wei Guang's letter "Frustrated by NEA's weather info hotline, site" (Oct 16-17).

We wish to apologise to Mr Lam for the inconvenience that he experienced. The lightning information on NEA's weather hotline (6542 7788) is being replaced with a newer and better system and is expected to be ready in October next year. We will inform the public when the new system is operational.

Mr Lam was unable to access to NEA website at 4.25am on Oct 10 as the website was undergoing routine maintenance on that day between midnight and 8am. We will ensure that users are kept informed of the period of scheduled maintenance.

We thank Mr Lam for his feedback.

Instead of spending time and money calling for a tender to build a new system, which will only produce results next year, a much simpler solution could have been implemented during the time of the overloading and had the problem fixed within hours.

The NEA web page showing the PSI reading was a very 'heavy' page filled with graphics and other extraneous information. What the NEA could have done is to put up a stripped down page with only the bare PSI reading information, which will not only cut down server load significantly, but could also be marketed as being 'mobile phone friendly'. This is a very common practice among popular websites, as they seek to attract mobile phone surfers such as those using the iPhone.

This simple solution could be implemented in PHP or even the current ASP framework within a few hours (including UAT) for less than S$1,000.

Now, what we get is a new system, possibly over-sized to take care of peak traffic while idle most of the other times when the air is clear. Or we get a refactoring of the website code to move to a cloud-computing solution. Both of these are complicated ways to solve a simple problem. Complexity of course means more energy, money and time expended, with doubtful benefits.