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A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

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Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#11

Post by kartan »

ProAm wrote: post #9
notyourwork wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it is good they can support it. However, is 8k TPS really a big deal? The team I work with handles 1M TPS.

it's the government, we're thrilled they can do anything.

It all depends how much politics are involved, or how much public workers can freely do their jobs:

https://www.nasa.gov/ http://www.darpa.mil/

And is Healthcare.gov developed by the government or just bough to an external company? It just an observation, I don't know if Healthcare.gov is a good or bad technology.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#13

Post by sumoboy »

ProAm wrote: post #9
notyourwork wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it is good they can support it. However, is 8k TPS really a big deal? The team I work with handles 1M TPS.

it's the government, we're thrilled they can do anything.

Especially after spending billions $$ just to create the platform, it should have been able to do that day 1.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#14

Post by lcw »

I'm glad heathcare.gov is getting better. I would assume however the most important part of tests for open enrollment are the writes to user management where reads and writes simultaneously are exercised against datastores. Looks like users were manually created not sure if they included updates in the tests. I'm wondering if the tests were just auth based? That would make sense why they could easily scale horizontally since auth is a lot of times just limited to cpu capacity.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#15

Post by notyourwork »

swalsh wrote: post #10
notyourwork wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it is good they can support it. However, is 8k TPS really a big deal? The team I work with handles 1M TPS.

To be fair, a "transaction" here is probably a lot more complex than people give credit. Healthcare is a very sophisticated beast... it's a huge many to many problem, and though people keep trying to "standardize" details always prevail.

That is a really good point.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#16

Post by sulam »

swalsh wrote: post #10
notyourwork wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it is good they can support it. However, is 8k TPS really a big deal? The team I work with handles 1M TPS.

To be fair, a "transaction" here is probably a lot more complex than people give credit. Healthcare is a very sophisticated beast... it's a huge many to many problem, and though people keep trying to "standardize" details always prevail.

Most sites are more complicated than they seem from the outside. Complexity is fractal -- the closer you get to something, the more complex it is.

One of my past employers was Salesforce.com. Seems pretty simple at first glance (and the early implementations were very simple), but then you learn more. Ignoring all of the platform-related stuff, just doing a multi-tenant database at scale turns out to be plenty hard.

The fact remains, they're a couple orders of magnitude away from extreme load.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#17

Post by kartan »

sulam wrote: post #7

8K transactions / second is hardly extreme load. It's good they can support it, and I doubt they need more, but many, many sites handle more load than that.

I will say that if the system scales well horizontally the important metric is how many resources you need to achieve that amount of transactions.

If they used 70 4-core m3.xlarge that means that they can attend 114 transactions/second per 4-core server. And that looks slow without more data about what are the requirements for the login process.

But if you look at the peak of 150 requests per second, then probably it will cost more money to improve the performance than to actually just add servers.

At work we have over 1 billion users. But as it scales horizontally the relevant number is how many memory/disk database instances do you have. The same applies to the application layer for the number of transactions. In fact the development servers are slower than the live ones even that they have just tens of thousands of users. For our amount of users/transactions tuning for performance saves lots of money. So it makes sense to improve the code on that measure.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#18

Post by Certhas »

ProAm wrote: post #9
notyourwork wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it is good they can support it. However, is 8k TPS really a big deal? The team I work with handles 1M TPS.

it's the government, we're thrilled they can do anything.

I know it's just a throw away joke, but this persistent idea that government is incompetent, no matter what is really damaging.

When it comes to health care systems there is no evidence whatsoever that less government means more efficiency, if anything the US is a huge example to the contrary.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#20

Post by rebootthesystem »

I am sure my wife will be very happy to learn about this test. It will definitely make up for our insurance going from about $12K per year to $26K per year. That, along with keeping our doctor and saving $2,500 per year have been fantastic.

News Flash: Engineers think technology while, in the real world, the problem has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

It's like tuning your Ferrarri for more power while your reality is you commute on the 405. In other words, irrelevant.

But, hey, congrats, glad to see what I am paying for.

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