Last month, Chief Justice Martha Koome announced a major initiative making filing court documents electronically (e-filing) possible in all courts across the country. This is part of the collective efforts of digitizing government services. However, since then, the online web portal has been causing more problems than delivering services. Legal practitioners are complaining of slow load times, unresponsiveness and frequent timeouts.
However, problems emerged almost immediately the service was launched. On march 26th, only six days after e-fling officially began, a lawyer lamented online saying, “Kenya Judiciary you did well to move services online. But your website is loading at tortoise speed and then just giving up in the middle,”
Unfortunately, he was not alone, two days later another advocate was afflicted.
“Hi Zakheem Rajan (a communications practitioner at the Judiciary of Kenya), kindly talk to CJ and Head of ICT. the system needs more capacity. Since national roll out, some of the issues litigants have been, missing case numbers, slow uptake of pleading on the CTS, slow STK push. The issues are endless,” wrote Ian Mutiso, an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya.
The matter has made advocates stay up late at night trying to file different legal documentation on the portal.
Soon after this article went live, the Judiciary put out a notice to the public acknowledging technical issues.
“We are experiencing a system intermittent outage on our efiling system. The technical team is working around the clock to ensure full system restoration,” reads part of the notice.
Judiciary Portal Ping Results
Our own trial to access the system was met with a timeout due to unresponsiveness. The second action was to ping the sub-domain (efiling.court.go.ke). The results were as displayed below.
Technically, “Request timed out” means that it took too long for the website to respond to two of the four pings that were sent out. This could indicate some network congestion or an issue with the website itself.
Of the four pings sent, only two replies were received. This 50% packet loss confirms that there are connection issues. However, the round-trip times (RTT) were within normal range for successful replies.
Judiciary E-filing Portal Host
Such issues make us question the compute, storage, and network capabilities of the hosting platform. Indeed, limited server bandwidth can cause network congestion. When the amount of data being transmitted exceeds the available bandwidth, it can cause a traffic jam of data, which can lead to network congestion. This can further slowdown data transmission and increase latency. Latency is the time it takes for data to travel across a network, from one place to another.
The platforms Hosting Checker and SiteChecker both confirm that the domain (efiling.court.go.ke) is hosted by Liquid Telecommunications LTD.
Liquid Telecom is a pan-African communications service provider that counts reputable local and global institutions among its clientele. Thus, it is highly unlikely it lacks the capacity to host such a crucial public resource. However, we are not privy to the service level agreement (SLA) between the tech company and the judiciary. This could show just how much resources the hosting portal allocates the platform.
A slow web application could be due to other factors such as code quality. Poor code quality leads to inefficient use of resources. In addition, a poorly designed database can lead to slow query responses and increased load times.
GOK Slow Web Applications
Government of Kenya (GOK) web portals have had similar issues. The Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) had similar problems recently. This led to the organization extending the application deadline as many students risked failing to submit applications in the initial window.
Our check confirmed that KUCCPS is hosted by a different service provider from the Judiciary e-filing portal. On face value it could mean that GOK web apps are poorly designed. Alternatively, there is a strong indication that GOK may be paying for low tier server packages. This may lead to bandwidth bottlenecks and servers operating at capacity. Basically, servers are often overloaded and can’t handle any more traffic.
If this is the case, there is a need to quickly scale up the resources. ICT scalability involves having systems operate at the ‘right’ size for current or expected demands, without pause.
Starting July 1, 2024, courts will no longer be allowed to print legal documents. As it is currently, this may prove to be a nightmare for Kenya’s Judiciary.
