# Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 3

DevFeed: [Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 3](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/scaling-findmypast-for-1921-census-release-part-3-19748.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://tech.findmypast.com/scaling-fmp-part-3/>)

Author: Mike Thomas

Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Findmypast](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/findmypast.md>)

Topics: [Deployment](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/deployment.md>), [Hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hardware.md>), [Kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kubernetes.md>), [Network](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/network.md>), [virtual machines](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/virtual-machines.md>), [Amazon Web Services](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/aws.md>), [Linux](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/linux.md>), [sql-server](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/sql-server.md>), [Windows](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/windows.md>), [ASP.NET](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/aspnet.md>), [C#](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/csharp.md>), [.NET](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/net.md>)

Tags: [aws](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/aws.md>), [blog-post](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/blog-post.md>), [c-sharp](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/c-sharp.md>), [chaos](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/chaos.md>), [deployment](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/deployment.md>), [findmypast](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/findmypast.md>), [hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hardware.md>), [infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/infrastructure.md>), [k8s](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/k8s.md>), [kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kubernetes.md>), [load](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/load.md>), [net](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/net.md>), [network](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/network.md>), [release](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/release.md>), [sql-server](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sql-server.md>), [stress](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/stress.md>), [testing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/testing.md>), [virtual-machines](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/virtual-machines.md>), [windows](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/windows.md>)

## AI overview

Findmypast describes the infrastructure challenges involved in scaling its service for the 1921 Census of England and Wales release. The third post in the series examines network timeouts and throughput problems during stress testing, leading the team to investigate hardware, Hyper-V, virtualized networking, Kubernetes, AWS, and related service infrastructure.

## Source excerpt

Findmypast (FMP) released the 1921 Census of England & Wales at midnight on Jan 6th 2022 to an eager community of genealogists. The preparation of the census - preservation, digitisation and transcription took three years of hard work. Aside from the data preparation, we also had technical challenges to address. Specifically, could our services deal with the projected increase in users for the first few days of 1921 launch period? This post is the third in a series that details how we approached scaling our service to deal with a projected day one 12x increase of users. Digging deeper into the infrastructure We left the second blog post in a poor position, our scaling efforts were not going well; network timeouts and throughput issues dogged each and every one of our stress test game days. At this point, we started to suspect the issue was related to hardware rather than the services. We started to dig deeper into all layers of the network stack, along with looking at the new Hyper-V hardware. Before we dig too deeply into the things, lets recap on our existing hardware setup. For the search backend, we use SOLR with a cluster of bare metal machines to index and retrieve search results. This was one area where we knew in advance that we needed more resources, so we scaled the cluster into AWS for extra compute. The majority of the Findmypast service runs on K8s, but not on bare metal. The K8s cluster is composed of Linux virtual machines running on Hyper-V. Our Hyper-V setup consisted of two clusters of bare metal machines, however both clusters were running different versions of Hyper-V We also have some areas of the site still running Windows servers with a Microsoft .Net/C# stack with SQL Server backend. These are also virtual machines running on the same Hyper-V hardware. The internal services, staging environments, etc also run as virtual machines under Hyper-V. So, SOLR aside, Hyper-V managed pretty much everything, from our internal deployment process to the