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News and Comment October 2015

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12 October - Why are we waiting?

You will have guessed, since it is 9 p.m. and still no blog, that nothing of note came to my attention today but there is a Public Cabinet meeting tomorrow and I thought it was about time I looked at the Agenda.

As anyone who has tried to use Bexley council’s website will know, it can be best described as a huge mess, especially the bit on the democracy sub-domain which is the section I normally use.

It has been especially crap for the past couple of weeks to the point of being unusable. As I write I am still waiting for the relevant page to respond and I must have been waiting ten minutes for pages before I decided it might be worthy of a quick blog. I’ve been navigating from the website’s home page which involves multiple clicks and so far the quickest a single page has come up is just under four minutes.


Bexley's crap web server My own net connection is currently providing me with a 76 megabytes per second download speed and I can ping most nearby sites in seven milliseconds. Sites in the USA are only 15 milliseconds but Bexley does not respond at all.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, Bexley’s democracy site is nearly always bad but recently it has been unbelievably bad. Occasionally off air for hours on end. Don’t councillors ever notice?

Bexley council which probably employs no one who knows anything about the web was recently planning on renewing their contract with the crap IT supplier Steria Ltd. who operate from a shed in Brampton Road.

I could probably have walked there quicker than Steria delivered the required PDF down the line. Bexley paid Steria Ltd. £433,966 in the last month for which figures are currently available.

Bexley’s webserver is so damned slow that it still refers to the mayor as a him! And this crazy council thinks it is going to successfully move all its business to the web. It will probably be as successful as the brown bin rollout.
Out of date
Ping: To bounce data off a distant website and time how long it takes to come back. Under 10 milliseconds is extremely good. Anything under 30 can be regarded as pretty well instantaneous.

 

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