VietNamNet Bridge - The official website of the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) crashed on the afternoon of July 22 because of overloading, making it impossible for students to check their exam scores. 

The trouble occurred at 2.30 pm on July 22, the time when MOET began making public the national high school finals’ results.  The ministry’s website was accessible but no action could be taken because of millions of people were trying to access the site. 

The ministry’s website was designed for 60,000 simultaneous visitors only.

MOET later tried to fix the problem by sharing the database with some universities to balance the load. 

However, the solution could not help much. People could only access Da Nang and Can Tho Universities’ websites which had servers with the capacity big enough.

The overloading of MOET’s website, experts said, was a DDoS problem because of the high number of visitors. 

One million students attended the national high school finals in early July.

Meanwhile, experts believe that the number of concurrent users (CCU) could be up to 2-3 million, because not only students but their parents and relatives also wanted to check information.

MOET should have anticipated the problem and applied necessary measures to prevent problems.

There are three solutions which can be used to ease the load on the MOET’s website. 

First, using a high-capacity proxy server systems and allowing access based on IP addresses. 

Examinees in the northern, central and southern regions will be served by different servers, thus easing the load on one system.

Second, setting up separate times for students in different regions to access the website to check information. 

Third, allowing students to access the exam score system at any time. They need to declare their order numbers on the list of examinees, full names and their email addresses. 

The system will automatically check the database and send information to the email addresses given by examinees. This solution has been used by many schools in the world.

Experts do not think that the three solutions, if applied in a flexible way, will help settle the problem, while there is no need for MOET to set up a server system with a large capacity, because the overloading only exists at certain moments.

Of the 816,830 students who sat the high school examinations in July 68,700 failed, for a pass rate of 91.58 per cent, a 7.44 per cent decline compared to 2014 and some 6 per cent less than in 2012 and 2013. Students in high schools passed at a rate of 93.42 per cent while the pass rate for those in continuing education was 70.08 per cent.

Huy Phong