France's Geoportail crashes after launch

Heavy traffic crash lands France's Geoportail service that maps entire France.

France's Geoportail, a Google Earth-like software, which maps the entire France has come and crashed. The service was launched on Friday and it crashed shortly after its launch because of the huge number of users. The service, known as Geoportail, offers high-resolution pictures of the entire France and is still unavailable due to the high number of users .

The Geoportail was launched by none other than French president Jacques Chirac. At the official launch of the service, he said, "This is a step forward for all citizens, which places France at the forefront of new technologies."

The Geoportail claimed to have the capability to zoom in to within 50 centimetres of the ground and it also offered options to switch from aerial views of a site, to detailed maps, charts and geological data.

The new software which reportedly was meant to prove the French technological advantage over others, crumbled under the stress from eager users of the service. The Geoportail was developed by National Geographic Institute. The site cost around 6 million euros and reportedly contained 3,700 topographical maps and 400,000 aerial photographs.

The service used an Open Source Apache web server and it crashed when services requests which exceeded almost 600 per second. Since the crash, the home page has been inaccessible and the eager users will have to wait for some more time before the Geoportail gets ready to have another go.

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