The trouble we were having yesterday was due to an overload on the main department firewall and was, in fact, due to people fetching the local copies of the voting machine demonstration video on the itpolicy site. Originally, all the content was distributed through CoBlitz which kept the load on the firewall down. Because CoBlitz uses non-standard ports (a current, but temporary PlanetLab limitation), many people were not able to view the video as originally posted. At around noon, we added links to local copies of the video to accommodate visitors who were in this situation. Demand for the local copies was higher than we anticipated — it may be that people were simply mirroring the site without trying to get the CoBlitz\’ed versions. We have since made some changes to the voting page and the situation has stabilized. It is not clear that the improvement was due to the changes we made or due to a drop in visitors. Looking at the CoBlitz load suggests that there was a drop in visitors to the site. We will continue to monitor the situation closely.
In the not-too-distant future, we will be deploying a new firewall which will be able to handle much higher loads.