If you had any interest in digging through the newly-released data trove of the 1940 census, you’ll quickly realize that there are millions of people to compete with – enough to make the archive painfully slow to access on Monday.
“In the first three hours that the site was live, we had 22.5 million hits and although we were prepared for a large traffic volume, we frankly had not anticipated that many users at one time,” National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said Monday.
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The National Archives made the more than 3.8 million pages of detailed Census data available online Monday morning, and although much of peripheral information about the records remain navigable, trying to get the documents themselves often lead to an error message.
Cooper said the National Archives, expecting the high volume, contracted the website management to Archives.com and Inflection.com, which both specialize in large databases. But given the number of hits the site is receiving, National Archives staff are phoning the companies every half hour for progress updates.The data is a snapshot of the United States on April 1, 1940, a time when the nation’s population was less than half of what it is now.
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