In India, we are bedevilled with a shortage of bandwidth, as a result of which the information superhighway becomes a rutted dirt track most of the time. Even if there is adequate bandwidth available, you might still not be able to access a site if it has not been equipped with a bandwidth that is adequate for the anticipated traffic. The information that you have requested for by typing in the address of the site can only come out of the site at the bandwidth that has been allotted to it. Thus, even if you have a thick pipe at your end, if the supply pipe is thin, then there will be a mere trickle of information at your end, observes Roopinder Singh

THIS is that time of the year. Anxiety, tension and results. For many youngsters, this is the time when they have to face up to the post-examination reality. Their future is on the line as it is the exam results that are going to determine what they study and where.

Many institutions have announced that they will release the results on the Internet. In a significant number of cases, this has resulted in hardships for the students, who found it very difficult to get the results. They flocked to cyber cafes, contacted "uncles" and "aunties" in various offices and used whatever means they could to get the results. Some were successful, but for many, the result of all this activity was far from satisfying.

An Internet professional was browsing in a cyber café when results were declared and was witness to an endless stream of students who wanted to see their results online. Many students did not have the correct addresses of the website where results were declared.

And cyber cafe owners even turned a few students away telling them not to bother, as the sites "would not open".

There are various reasons for this. The basic problem is that not enough thought has gone in to the matter of posting results on the Internet. Though there are inherent issues of bandwidth and infrastructure that create roadblocks, much could and should have been done with proper planning and understanding. As the Americans would say, this is a whole new ballgame with a different set of rules.

When making a site that is to be used for posting results, you can either have a database driven site, like the one used for CBSE results, or a simple one like the one used for posting results of CET for the engineering colleges of the region.

A database is a collection of data arranged for ease and speed of search and retrieval. A simple database might be a single file containing many records (like roll numbers), each of which contains the same set of fields, like subjects, marks etc.

In a database driven site, you query (type in) the roll number and get the result. This kind of site provides better service, though it is difficult and expensive to set up. Such a site makes proper use of the interactivity provided by the Internet.

A cheaper alternative is to just put the numbers onto a web page, as you would on paper. This method fails to take advantage of the interactive nature of the Internet. Such pages are also difficult to download, since the size is huge. In any case, once the page has been downloaded, it is difficult to locate the roll number, since you have to scroll down the page.

The choice is obvious in this case. Spending some extra time and money would have resulted in a more efficient solution in presenting the results.

Most of the readers would, by now, be aware of bandwidth problems. Bandwidth is a data transmission rate; the maximum amount of information (bits/second) that can be transmitted along a channel. Let’s for the sake of simplicity, think of bandwidth as a pipe through which information will flow. It stands to logic that the wider the pipe, the better will be the flow of data through it.

In India, we are bedevilled with a shortage of bandwidth, as a result of which the information superhighway becomes a rutted dirt track most of the time.

Even if there is adequate bandwidth available, you might still not be able to access a site if it has not been equipped with a bandwidth that is adequate for the anticipated traffic. The information that you have requested for by typing in the address of the site can only come out of the site at the bandwidth that has been allotted to it. Thus, even if you have a thick pipe at your end, if the supply pipe is thin, then there will be a mere trickle of information at your end.

This is one aspect that people often tend to overlook. Whenever something like the results are posted on the Net, there is bound to be a sudden demand on the bandwidth of the server that is hosting the site. If the server is under-equipped to handle the surge, there will be delays, and in the worst-case scenario, even disruption of service.

This happened with dismaying frequency on sites where results were posted. Incidentally, even during the last general elections, servers that were supposed to post the results faced similar problems.

What also adds to the problem is that often sites are design driven, full of fancy do-dads and pop-ups that slow the pages down and put a greater load on the processing power of the servers. It is worth noting that yahoo.com, arguably the most-visited site on the Internet, is simplicity itself, with almost no graphics.

If there are 50,000 people trying to access a site within a few hours, it puts tremendous load on the server, which would either slow it down significantly, or at times, even overwhelm it to the extent that it crashes Provisions have to be, therefore, made for such solutions like multiple-servers (on a round-robin system), or mirror sites.

The kind of server platform that the site is on also makes a big difference. Generally speaking, according to experts, servers running on Linux or Unix software can take a higher hit rate than those running on NT.

Often, government organisations that have the responsibility of publishing the results do not like to pay much money to professional organisations, trying to do it all in-house. The posting of results is often a once-a-year phenomenon; it does not make sense to have a large in-house team for such events.

One site tried another innovation this time. It tied up with a private company to provide results, redirecting the visitors to that site that made visitors sign up for various free services before letting them access the result. This, of course, raised the frustration levels of the visitors, who had to fill all the forms even while they were waiting with bated breath.

Whatever the results, these were students who faced a lot of frustration when Net promises produced poor results. Hopefully by the next batch of results, administrators and webmasters would have learnt their lesson.