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Early Struggles for FiveThirtyEight, 270toWin

Early performance problems are plaguing two popular sites tracking the Electoral College tally, FiveThirtyEight and 270toWin.

An update on Scaling for Election Night: We're already seeing signs of significant performance problems at two popular sites tracking the Electoral College tally, FiveThirtyEight and 270toWin. Here's a status report from FiveThirtyEight:

Apologies in advance -- blogger.com looks likely to about to pull an epic fail tonight on our most important night. I've been clicking publish since before 6pm central on one post, and the rest of the internet is lightning speed. Just looking at results and fruitlessly clicking "publish." We're here and trying to publish; just can't. They can't handle the traffic. Sorry everybody.

Parts of the site are loading better than others, with blog posts seeming to fare better than maps. UPDATE: FiveThirtyEight appears to be loading faster now (8:35 pm Eastern). Perhaps someone at Google has noticed and intervened.

Over at 270toWin, site operators are also reporting difficulties handling traffic loads:

The site may be slow or unreachable this evening due to extreme traffic levels. At 6PM, the '2008 Swing States' view on the home page interactive map was set to all swing and we will attempt to update through the evening. ... Other features on the site will not be updated and some have been disabled.

FiveThirtyEight is hosted on Google’s Blogger platform, while 270toWin hosts with 1&1 Internet.

Here's the good news: Twitter appears to be doing fine so far.

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