GOV.PK

How “The Official Web Gateway to the Government of Pakistan” website is designed can be described as “dumb” and “prehistoric”. I took the liberty to view source code.

  1. Amount of data being transferred at first visit : around 650kb in 15 queries to the webserver. 2 of them reaching out directly to the cache server just to pick up javascript files and HTML files.
  2. The website is built in frames which is “prehistoric” even to the internet.
  3. 15 Javascript files are transferred including the complete Prototype library (94kb) and Scriptaculous library (100+kb) which is actually an alternative to Prototype and a sounds library (97kb). In short its a clusterf**k.
  4. The html files have one of the worst written code of all times.

NaMaan: The reason not only you but we are having this difficulty is because some genius figured out that if he runs a cache server, the webpages will load faster. Yes they do load faster but you have to properly configure it otherwise it ends up as a mess and what you see is a mess. I simply wish they a reverse proxy installed. It reduces the delay we all face. I also took the liberty to see how many hops it takes to reach the website. Turns out 15 and its hop 10 and 12 that’s causing the delay. A high number of hops hence more points of failures but absurdly enough the gateway to pakistan is in abottabad and through a website named server4sale.net(WTF??) Perhaps its time we figure out our own routes or get direct pipes to our gov sites :slight_smile: Anyways the website is simply a disgrace, I know for a fact that there are pakistani web development firms that are capable of doing much better interms of design and content management.

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