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- Aug 15, 2004
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People keep asking why the mcat people don't just give us a definite time and date that the scores will be up. In addition to being sadistic, I believe if they tell people that they'll be up at exactly 10PM, for example, then that will cause a flood of people all trying to get their scores at the same second and that will cause the server to be hammered and come to a crawl. And in order to accomodate 30,000 queries in a matter of seconds they'd need some very expensive server and networking equipment and the cheapasses they are, they won't buy it. Instead, they decide to purposely be vague so as to let people check their scores throughout the day to be spread out and lessen the load on their servers.
Just to put things in perspective, Google serves 250 million searches per day which comes out to a little less than 3000 searches per second (of course there are more searches during the day than the night and 3000 is just an average) and uses 10,000 servers to accomplish this. So can you imagine what you'd need to serve 30,000 requests in a second?
So now you can understand why the mcat people won't tell exactly when the scores will be up. Alas, I will be checking the THx every minute. I just wish that they would email the scores. That would make life a lot simpler.
Just to put things in perspective, Google serves 250 million searches per day which comes out to a little less than 3000 searches per second (of course there are more searches during the day than the night and 3000 is just an average) and uses 10,000 servers to accomplish this. So can you imagine what you'd need to serve 30,000 requests in a second?
So now you can understand why the mcat people won't tell exactly when the scores will be up. Alas, I will be checking the THx every minute. I just wish that they would email the scores. That would make life a lot simpler.
But, it always is fun while it lasts.
