If there was a Technorati-Indian edition, the top keyword search today would be CAT, IIM, CAT RESULTS or IIM CAT. This year, 2 lakh aspirants appeared for the B-School entrance exam. So considering an aspirant would have another 3 concerned people checking for their results (on an average comprising of their mom, dad and boyfriend/girlfriend ), it would total to approximately 8 lakh (800,000) people hitting the results site now as we speak, almost every second since they were officially announced at around 3 PM today (8th of Jan 2008) on the IIM websites. The irony however is the IIM websites cannot handle such traffic, and hence the people who want to check the results end up getting a server error page. This is something that we can term as CAT in a mouse-trap.

Let’s have a check at the technical details of the requirements. The result page needs a Date of Birth and an Exam ID for verification or mapping of the corresponding results. This page would be around 100 KB in size (including say the query data that is being handled to fetch the results), considering it has almost no graphics , and only static content, except for the displayed numbers. Considering 800,000 people accessing it by clicking their mouse buttons on the Submit button simultaneously, the query to fetch the data from the results database and display would definitely be handled by the server. This means a total data of around of approximately 80,000 MB or approximately 80 GB of data is being handled by the servers every second (of course assuming, all the users are hitting the website simultaneously). The question is why the IIMs don’t outsource this task to some third party WebHosting company who can handle this amount of data and bandwidth and avoid the inconvenience caused. Of course, there are other means like SMS alerts for results etc, but to check for the IIM call list, website checking is the only way out. If you already have an account at CAT forums like Pagalguy.com, you’re quite aware of it, else you’ll be surprised at the sheer size of threads that must be running today, with announcement of results.