The LDS Church braced Monday for high tide. What it got was a tidal wave.
Interest in the church's FamilySearch.org genealogy Web site that formally launched Monday was so intense the whole system had to be taken down for about two hours so computer hardware could be reconfigured to handle the traffic: 400 to 500 hits per second."We're victims of our own success," said Paul Nauta, manager of planning and communications in the church's Family History Department.
"We're still trying to work with IBM to assess where we are this morning," he said Tuesday.
The church maintains the largest genealogy library in the world. Beginning April 1, the church put about 400 million names from its genealogy collection on the Internet and began a public test of the Web site.
With little publicity, the site at http://www.FamilySearch.org was drawing 7 million to 11 million hits per day during the test. Publicity over the past weekend about Monday's formal launch pumped traffic up to about 20 million hits per day.
The church had no doubt Monday's launch would bring much more traffic to the site. "The hit rate was about three times what they suspected," said IBM spokeswoman Jan Walbridge.
IBM technicians scrambled Monday afternoon to reconfigure load balancers that distribute traffic coming into the site. "There has been phenomenal volume. Even the people at IBM haven't seen anything quite like that," Walbridge said.
Dale Bills, a spokesman for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said that while the effect of the site's "grand opening" is causing a visitor spike that is expected to level out over time, the site offers archive space that is expected to gain more popularity as time goes on.
Visitors to FamilySearch.org who find names on their family tree and build a pedigree are given the option of saving that pedigree in the church's electronic archive. "We were receiving more than 100,000 names per week in the three weeks prior to Monday's launch. I have no idea what this week is going to bode, but I think the number will go up."
A new Pedigree Resource File will be added to the site soon, making those submitted names searchable by others who visit the site. "I think that will draw a lot of people back to the site," Bills said.
The site also functions as a portal to other genealogy resources and facilitates e-mail contacts between individuals researching the same family lines.
Church President Gordon B. Hinckley formally launched FamilySearch.org Monday morning at a press conference in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. "Seeking to understand our family history can change our lives. It brings unity and cohesion to families," he said.
Church members seek out their ancestors because of the doctrine that family relationships can continue after death. "With that understanding, members of the church regard it as both a privilege and an obligation to seek out their forebears," President Hinckley said.