Friday, January 28, 2011

Get Your Facebook Email

Facebook has launched this service a few months back. However, very few know about it. 

Go here - > Facebook Email

Method 1 : Conventional,Slower Way
 Click on Request an invitation and then your page changes to...
 
Wait for a few days and you will receive a notification on messages. After you get that notification, go to "Messages" and click on "Activate Facebook Email". 

Method 2 : Faster

 Start begging :P. Yes. All those who have already activated can send 10 invites. This gives you instant activation.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

CAT Fails Yet Again

Analysis even before 24 Hrs of the announcement of the CAT 2010 Result.
CAT went online Last year and we saw how well it all went. One in 5 students was not able to take the Test.Tests were cancelled in 6 centers as glitches continued. The contract was given to Prometric which is a U.S. based company. Somehow, they managed to reschedule the exam and save them from further Embarrassment.

This year again, they made a severe Mistake. Today the results were announced but most of my friends and others were not able to open the Website. A simple Examination tells us Why?

the link to it was ->https://scorecard.catiim.in/index.html

This tell us that is was Secure Website! So is it really Required?


 A normal HTTP request is handled as shown above.

Whereas HTTPS requests are secure which means Certificate and Encrypted data is sent over the network.

All the Banking, Transaction websites use this. Even Google uses it to authenticate for their web users.


This is how complex a HTTPS connection can be. So know lets test both.


With Client and Server on the same Local Machine, using a Ubuntu and Apache Benchmark, 10000 requests.

TEST 1

Results for http ("ab -n 10000 http://CAT/index.html")
  • Time taken for tests: 2.664 seconds
  • Requests per second: 3753.69 (#/sec)
  • Time per request: 0.266ms
Results for https ("ab -n 10000 https://CAT/index.html"):
  • Time taken for tests: 107.673 seconds
  • Requests per second: 92.87 (#/sec)
  • Time per request: 10.767ms

TEST 2


Adding keep-alive (ab option -k) to the test improves the situation because now all requests share the same connection.

Results for http with keep-alive ("ab -k -n 10000 http://CAT/index.html")
  • Time taken for tests: 1.200 seconds
  • Requests per second: 8334.86 (#/sec)
  • Time per request: 0.120ms
Results for https with keep-alive ("ab -k -n 10000 https://CAT/index.html"):
  • Time taken for tests: 2.711 seconds
  • Requests per second: 3688.12 (#/sec)
  • Time per request: 0.271ms
 Hence, The first Test revealed HTTPS to be around 50 times slower. Test 2 with shared requests revealed it was nearly 2 times slower.

Imagine if all these Requests were concurrent, the server would be overwhelmed and give up. If you have a high End server on your system, you can test it with the following command .
 "ab -n 10000 -c 1000 http://CAT/index.html"
Also the SSL certificate used was on the same system which otherwise would take more time.

CAT was taken up by around 2 lakh candidates. At Peak time - Atleast 10,000 would request at the same time with an total hourly requests going upto 2,00,000. Massive load on the server with added SSL overhead for no reason.

So when you want to see your result, is it really required to be secure? Do we need to wait for a day more because the websites secure. And what use is that security for when I can see anyones result if i have their Roll No and Email ID!
Prometric still hasn't learned from its mistakes.