Summarized by Kent Larsen
Family tree site felled
BBC News 25May99 C9
Yesterday's formal release of the LDS Church's new family history website
was such a success that the load crashed the servers as about 500 people a
second tried to access the site. The site was down for six hours as IBM
technicians struggled to get more support to handle the traffic. IBM, which
hosts the site for the LDS Church, said that the demand was simply more
that expected. "It's triple, quadruple what they anticipated." said IBM
spokeswoman Jan Walbridge, "They did plan for a back-up system, but they
didn't think they'd have to use it so soon."
The site, called Family Search, is located at http://www.FamilySearch.org/.
It includes records on 400 million people dating back as much as 500 years
ago. The site includes just a porition of the 2 billion individuals on whom
the Church has collected information since 1894. The Church plans to add a
further 200 million individuals to the on-line database by the end of this
year.
[Editor's note. The launch of the Family Search website and the subsequent
crash due to workload has been carried on every major news service,
including Associated Press, Reuters, Cox, Knight-Ridder, and
Scripps-Howard. It seems to have appeared in every major newspaper
worldwide. - Ed.]
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