I received a lot of comments complaining about the GATE official, which was not opening for quite a few days. Finally the notice came out. It’s because of heavy traffic due to last date. As you know we all do things in last minute, even if we are reminded.
Here is what IITD website says about the reason of extending GATE 2012 application date.
“Registration and application submitted before 12th September 2011 will not be considered.
The site will be shutdown on 21st October 2011 at 23:00 hrs.
To avoid transaction failures, Internet access through mobile phones should not be used for ONLINE application.
There is an unprecedented rush to apply for GATE 2012. In view of this, the last date for application has been extended as given below:
1. Last date for Submission of Online Application (website closure at 23:00 Hrs): 21st October 2011 (Friday).
2. Last date for the receipt of printed version of ONLINE Application at the respective zonal GATE Office: 28th October 2011 (Friday).
As of 12 noon on 14 October, more than 8,93,000 candidates have registered online. During 24 hours on 13 October alone, nearly 96,000 candidates have registered. Due to this rush, if you experience reduced access speeds to the application website, we request you to kindly bear with us and try.”
I am actually surprised to see how a webserver maintained by the leading technical institute in nation can not handle a 100,000 registration in a day. And we are talking this in the age of cloud computing, where we can add resources and remove them with no efforts. We are living in an age where concurrent programming is just a daily routine. I think IITs should seriously think about it. There is no harm in outsourcing these projects to professional companies that can do pretty well on the fly. Many universities in US and other countries do it. These companies will also help Univ understand and analyze applications.
Other thing can be to share the load among other organizing institutes, and distribute load among 8 different nodes.
Hope we leap ahead faster, we usually think we are but most of the time we wrong. Wish you all and IITs a greater luck ahead.