More than 40 times … maybe the 50th time will be the charm.
Ah - the answer emerges. Check this out:
The Patent Office is…drumroll, please!..SELF-FUNDED. Yep. They get their money from the fees they collect directly for the stuff they do!
I almost want to cry, or…something. It’s like finding out the Tooth Fairy is real. Or spotting a sparkly rainbow unicorn in your backyard. Can you imagine? A government agency that actually pays its own way? In THIS country?! It’s…
HOPE! Tiny, infinitesimal, electron-microscope-requiring hope. But still.
That would actually be, um… kinda useful. I’m scared now.
Howay, you know better than most that there isn’t ANY kind of ‘this will not suck on rollout’ button (would that there were, eh?). I really wish I had a GSV at my disposal, and could just be displaced places to punch folks who needed it in the snoot, punctuated by phrases like ‘universal healthcare’, ‘decent basic standard of living’ and ‘pin-point orbital strike’…
(the phrase ‘Have you met my knife-missile?’ might be a handy one too)
That’s why it would never happen.
This.
Load testing sites that are desended upon by millions on the first day is a difficult challenge. Real humans with their multiple tabs, browsers and refresh-button-clicky-fingers are hard to model precisely and all it takes is a bit of a backlog before computa says no.
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Except for the part where they ALREADY run just such sites, with the same kinds of loads and users for a very similar purpose, and still couldn’t manage to get it right…although, lunch and a beer says they are developed by two separate groups who do not talk or share code…because org charts.
Where did you read that? I have this statement ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/us/problems-persist-on-second-day-of-insurance-markets.html?partner=rss&emc=rss )
The federal exchange Web site, healthcare.gov, opened to the public at 8 a.m. Tuesday, and by Wednesday afternoon, it had had 6.1 million unique visitors, the Department of Health and Human Services said — a pace many times as great as the Medicare site had ever seen.
Didn’t need to. Years’ worth of development work for DHHS. It was egregiously predictable, and for the same reasons. The agencies and their contractor-developers who perform 99.9% of the actual development work) are managed by people who do not remotely grasp the technology they employ. But, you don’t need any sworn testimony from me as to that - Sebelius told you so. (It’s like…ipods, right?)
The precise volume isn’t an issue. Each year, medicare alone drives millions of ‘unique visitors’ through its horrific annual selections process for coverages. The number of users who will qualify for ObamaCare is just as predictable. The numbers were not only known, but endlessly quoted by the people (I mean, politicians) who wrote and promoted the program for YEARS on end prior to the start of the project. It was only a question of upscaling what they already do. And they blew it. Because, ipods, right?
It’s this quote that makes me question whether you really understand launch day for a highly anticipated web 2.0 website. The precise volume really does matter and what matters most in this situation is that the metric you are talking about: number of users who will qualify. In the case of Obamacare, the people visiting the site were from across the spectrum: People who knew they’d qualify, people who knew they wouldn’t qualify, people who were unsure if they would qualify. All of these people descended on one website at around the same time on the same day. This unnatural spike in visits is the reason servers chuck a skitz and stop working.
I also imagine that if you were working as a developer then you probably didn’t have much to do with load testing what you developed. As I said above: even robust load testing prior to launch is only an indication of expected performance. Real-world users don’t follow rules like simulated ones. Some food for thought: Twitter goes Fail Whale once in a while (less and less lately) and all they’re ever dealing with is adding 140 characters at a time to a database.
Odds are, I’ve been through more go-lives than you have so far. Got in the biz in the 70’s. I’ve designed large systems, been a developer, and am a qualified and experienced systems engineer. I understand the spike prob. And it does not need to be a prob, providing the server farm is adequate and configured properly, and the software itself is relatively clean going out the door. They HAVE a semi-working model and have had for years now.
Thing in this particular case is, this wasn’t their first time at the rodeo. Same types of users, same essential product, same basic functions required to underpin the site and bring the user to mama.
If the set-up was anywhere near adequate, then a comparison to Twitter wouldn’t even be apropos to this particular project. The data’s considerably more complex than twit requires, so the failures could easily have occurred in additional areas, and likely did - not that this forms a decent excuse.
The problem is, this was a DHHS project. I spent years inside their crap operations and know their game in some ways most people who work there don’t even have to see. If you haven’t been in there, you can’t really defend them, and if you had? Seriously - you wouldn’t even try, lol. They actually have a few things they do pretty well. This is just not one of 'em. In spades. shame, really. Not everybody who works for them is an incompetent jerk, or anything. Not in the technical positions, anyway. They actually have some pretty awesome people in there. This kind of stuff is just endemic to their mode of operating.
About the only way I’d back up on this, is if we hear from people who actually got in and accomplished what they came for. And so far, I haven’t seen even one. So, that’s well above and beyond the usual roll-out glitches. The chances that Sebelius actually has the slightest idea what went wrong are…a near certainty. She showed you what her level of comprehension is, and what she thinks yours is. If you believe that didn’t get covered rather scathingly during smoke breaks or lunches - heh. Frankly, I’d be expecting a little action from the Onion on this one…
EDIT: I do apologize, teapot. My original wording you complained of was a poor choice. Mea culpa, there.
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