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Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

thedoctorweighsin.com

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Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#21

Post by tmarthal »

guiomie wrote: post #4

"I can tell that this system consists of a JBoss Application Server with data access components and RESTful web services developed using Java. Given my prior experience with JBoss and Java, although they are great for middleware development, they’re known to be a bit slow." I always had this non founded impression that something running on the JVM would be slow ... this author also. Anyone with data to back this impr…

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

There are a ton of Java frameworks in the top performing benchmarks (See Lng:Jav). Whatever conclusion you've made from Java Swing applications running on top of WindowsXP machines in the early 00's are not applicable to modern web server performance.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#22

Post by ssmoot »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #5

A friend analyzed the page and noted that they didn't minify or combine anything. "One obvious reason is that they're serving unminified and unconcatenated Javascript and CSS files. A single page load causes 92 requests to the server, and they're not using a CDN for any of that. They're also not setting the Cache-Control and Expires headers, so the browser isn't caching many of those files, including on 80k file full…

I seriously doubt that the static content performance of NGinx (or whatever) has anything to do with performance issues. They're probably spending more money on bandwidth than they need to, and offer a slightly degraded user experience, especially for people on slower connections, but otherwise...

Things may have changed since October 1st, but on second page load of the home-page, I'm seeing the majority of content as either cached or served by CDN, a relatively small functional payload compared to a lot of HN darlings, and an 79ms latency for the main request.

None of that is really alarming IMO.

Even so, half these assets are trackers and 3rd party resources that would probably be CDNed externally. If storage IO and bandwidth isn't your limit (and internally the URLs could easily be routed to different servers entirely as well as caching proxies), then it's pretty plausible that there's practically nil overall performance impact as far as service availability goes.

Also, I think the whole "you should only use one of each type of asset" philosophy is debatable at least.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#23

Post by dm2 »

nathas wrote: post #2

$293M.... I'm just consistently angry over how much this cost. There are so many moving pieces, and while I understand that, $293M for one piece. Half a billion for a website. Christ.

Seriously, that number is staggering.

CGI Federal literally ripped off the government, screwed the American people badly, and "stole" hundreds of millions. They should never be allowed to work on another project again and should be required to refund the government. The project managers should be fired and publicly humiliated.

I STILL cannot even login to the website. The site has said "The system is down at the moment." for the past two weeks.

The only reasonable explanation that I can imagine is sabotage by someone who didn't want Obamacare to succeed, the same thing that happened in Congress recently.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#25

Post by showerst »

nathas wrote: post #2

$293M.... I'm just consistently angry over how much this cost. There are so many moving pieces, and while I understand that, $293M for one piece. Half a billion for a website. Christ.

Not that it becomes a reasonable number, but according to the Post[1], it's more like 175 million. So 20% of a billion dollars...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#26

Post by dm2 »

usaphp wrote: post #20

$293Mln...Ok so it's like hiring a team of 100 web developers, pay each of them $100K a year, and they will work non-stop for 30 years... Edit: Working non stop for 30 years.

Realistically you would need to double that 100k to pay for other expenses (hardware, benefits, office, management). Even then, CGI Federal screwed the American people and should be fined for what they've done.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#27

Post by edwinnathaniel »

guiomie wrote: post #4

"I can tell that this system consists of a JBoss Application Server with data access components and RESTful web services developed using Java. Given my prior experience with JBoss and Java, although they are great for middleware development, they’re known to be a bit slow." I always had this non founded impression that something running on the JVM would be slow ... this author also. Anyone with data to back this impr…

"Anyone with data to back this impression ?"

No. Because it's not the AS that is slow. Someone else's code that is not efficient enough or doing too much DB calls.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#28

Post by sourc3 »

icn2 wrote: post #19

At least they didn't use windows/.net stack this time.

What makes you say that? Having built systems in this space with very large number of users using the .net platform, I wonder why you stated this.

I am a supporter of open and non-MS software but I don't think we can blame it on the technology this time.

In my experience so far a well engineered system, will perform regardless of the technology stack picked. Picking technology X or Y will not compensate for bad architecture and engineering practices.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#29

Post by ryanobjc »

People appear to be missing the point that _the website_ is literally the smallest part of the project.

While it's easy for people to crap on things like js-minifying, cache control, etc - the hard reality is the stuff that is the hardest is so hard that most people have never done anything even remotely close.

Having worked on 10m+ loc codebases, life gets very hard. Dynamic languages tend to be unworkable. Module control, strong interfaces, and a lot of division of responsibility becomes the order of the day. And just figuring out how to build the thing becomes it's own team.

For those who are just thinking "so, just slap together some JSON/web services and call it a day" - I invite you to research EDI and then report back here. Assuming you're still alive.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#30

Post by edwinnathaniel »

usaphp wrote: post #20

$293Mln...Ok so it's like hiring a team of 100 web developers, pay each of them $100K a year, and they will work non-stop for 30 years... Edit: Working non stop for 30 years.

Don't forget:

- Software licenses

- Software support/contracts (Redhat -> JBoss AS)

- Hardware

- Office space

- Benefits

- Infrastructure contracts (for 10 years... or 100 years)

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