Obamacare website can’t handle as much traffic as a website run by one guy in his pajamas

wordpress ^ | October 5, 2013 | Dan from Squirrel Hill

[grundle]

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog

Obamacare website can’t handle as much traffic as a website run by one guy in his pajamas

drudgereport.com is run by Matt Drudge, who runs the website in his pajamas from his apartment. I’ve visited his website just about every day since the late 20th century. It runs very well. His website has gotten as many as 45 million hits per day.

On the first day of the Obamacare website, it had 5 million visitors. It could not handle that amount of traffic.

IT experts who had analyzed the data going to and from the Obamacare website said the reason that people could not use it was because it was launching the equivalent of a “denial of service attack” against itself. They said the website was sending and receiving massive amounts of unnecessary data back and forth between itself and users’ computers. The IT experts attributed this to bad programming, and said that adding more servers would not fix the problem.

[unixfox]

Surely more money will fix the problem.

[Doomonyou]

The joys of the lowest bidder.

[dfwgator]

Must have hired the same guys who wrote Romney’s Orca Application.

[SERKIT]

Company with $1.2 billion Obamacare contract under investigation for ‘serious fraud’

[gitmo]

Maybe Obama could hire Jimrob when he gets out of the hospital.

NAAAAH.

[Wingy]

I like that idea.

[digger48]

What makes you think they went with the lowest bidder?

They threw this to Donors and Fellow Travellers. Damn the cost.

[Celtic Conservative]

I heard that the canadian IT firm that is responsible for O-care is the same firm responsible for the now infamous (and failed) Canadian gun registry. Why am I not suprised?

CC

[Bryanw92]

Just remember one thing: Obamacare is designed to fail. It is the half-assed compromise measure that is supposed to whet the appetites of the lazy and stupid, so that they demand something more—like single payer socialist health care.

[usconservative]

Drudge Report content is nothing more than a Web Page with referral links, some light graphics and a few ads. Simply speaking, not hard to serve up 45 million hits a day from perhaps 2 or 3 load balanced servers on a medium sized internet pipe.

That is VASTLY DIFFERENT from a website that is taking input and accessing back end databases, matching up information, etc..

Comparing the two is truly comparing apples and oranges.

Now, if you want to simply belittle the Federal Government for not being able to put up a website given their limitless access to money (our tax dollars) then by all means go for it!

[TigersEye]

You can build a free website that works better with online software. If you like it you can get more bells and whistles and more bandwidth for a low subscription fee.

[andyk]

I wonder how they load tested it before deployment. I wonder what the real number of users per second and total connections they were actually prepared to handle.

[SaxxonWoods]

It’s a miracle they haven’t thought of blaming this on the shutdown yet.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Exactly. I don’t know why our side cannot understand this.

[Lazamataz]

Well.... listen, I don't think this is a fair comparison. ObamaCalamity Websites were unveiled to high-traffic in a one-shot opening, whereas Drudge evolved to that level of traffic. In computers, that sort of time -- years, in Drudge's case -- matters.

That said, Obama's team should have KNOWN what to expect and STRESS-TESTED to twice the expected level, or at LEAST throttle incoming attempts. Goddamn, *I* could have architected a solution, and I'm lame.

[Lazamataz]

Not one that handles 5 million incoming visitors in a week, you can’t.

[TigersEye]

Point taken. I doubt they ever expected to get 5 million hits in a week in CO though. Yet the state site and the exchange website load like molasses.

[Lazamataz]

Nah, if I was architecting this thing, the FIRST thing I would assume is the highest level of hits we estimated was two orders of magnitude too low, so I would build it like this:

1) A throttler layer. This is where you go first, this is the public URL. A series of machines is set up here to simply decide who gets in at all (randomly selected). Those who can, get to the real enrollment site. Those who exceed the load limit get a small-size static page saying that they must try later due to excessive load.

2) The real web-enrollment area is behind that firewall. These machines are the ones dedicated to actually servicing enrollments. Their load is much smaller, therefore, they are very responsive.

The vast majority of the machines would be at 1), the Throttler layer. They would also be the fastest and most robust machines. I would also employ anti-DDOS technology.