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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

#41

Post by honkhonkpants »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #20

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…

What did your premiums look like before? In my case I just didn't have insurance because there was no functioning market anywhere that would sell you a family health care plan including childbirth, at any price. Now I get health insurance from my employer which isn't affected by ACA so I don't know what the market looks like.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#42

Post by sixbit »

llimllib wrote: post #40
jlebar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we see the real test of whether healthcare.gov has reached the level of consumer tech: Does bug-report-via-top-ranked-HN-comment get anything done?

AFAICT it's actually a Cigna bug report yeah? Happy to make sure it gets to the right place if I'm wrong. (/me doesn't work for nava, does work on healthcare.gov)

There is a persistent error message on my 2016 profile on healthcare.gov after that button was clicked (despite it also showing it's active on that side of things). My understanding is that the bug is the integration point between the two. From past issues and what I've been told on this one, is that the only way things get fixed and made right is to have healthcare.gov retransmit the correct data/status. Cigna can't fix it on their own from their side. Thanks for the offer to help, didn't expect any action, just a post out of frustration. I'll shoot you and email.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#44

Post by user5994461 »

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.

For comparison, when I received the RFP for the Italian and the British (gov uk verify) national authentication systems.

The numbers that were asked for were 12k/auth per second during peak time for the Italians.

The British wasn't clear but it hinted at 0.1% of user authenticating per second, which is about the same range. (The numbers of users itself was not defined, it depends on who would join the program).

SLA: 1500 ms for the account verification. 150 ms for most operations. (Some more time when requesting optional attributes like name/address/phone)

If this interests you, I've published a few numbers I got from preliminary testing (to determine whether we could answer the RFP or not): https://thehftguy.com/2015/10/23/10-millions-users-accounts-...

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#45

Post by brightsize »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #20

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…

A few years ago, pre-ACA, and even without this kind of load testing, my individual high-deductible ("catastrophic") plan with a major provider had a 30%+ yearly premium increase with zero additional coverages whatsoever. They didn't say why at the time, but it was probably just system load testing costs. /s

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#46

Post by LargeCompanies »

coldcode wrote: post #6

I wonder if this healthcare.gov will exist a year from now. It is nice to see how far it has come in 2 years.

Doubtful Trump is getting rid of it.

Personally I preferred the previous way of signing up for coverage ... call up a private insurer and sign up? The cost was less too as I wasn't paying for insurance for lazy sally or Joe Schmoe! So for me Obamacare/social medicine forced those who do and work to pay and cover for those who don't. See ya Obamacare(love obama though).

Also the $300 plan I paid each month for sucked.. they fought me tooth and nail to cover things my doc prescribed.. I.e. Various scans(cat scan, etc).

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#47

Post by rgbrenner »

maxerickson wrote: post #38
rgbrenner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies don't insure the unemployed for free. They're either paying their own premiums, or they're on medicaid/medicare. If they're on medicaid, it was paid for by the state/fed government from taxes... not from insurance premiums paid by someone else.

The cost of Medicaid and Medicare may show up in insurance premiums. http://kff.org/report-section/uncompensated-care-for-the-uni... There are other discussions of cost shifting that will make more aggressive claims; I've chosen to link Kaiser Family Foundation because I think they are pretty credible.

the amount potentially associated with uncompensated care cost shifting is only 2.3 percent of private health insurance costs in 2013.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#48

Post by maxerickson »

rgbrenner wrote: post #47
maxerickson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of Medicaid and Medicare may show up in insurance premiums. http://kff.org/report-section/uncompensated-care-for-the-uni... There are other discussions of cost shifting that will make more aggressive claims; I've chosen to link Kaiser Family Foundation because I think they are pretty credible.

the amount potentially associated with uncompensated care cost shifting is only 2.3 percent of private health insurance costs in 2013.

Sure, it doesn't explain the high cost of care.

But the $21.1 billion out of $84.9 billion is a pretty big chunk of the unmet costs.

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#49

Post by user5994461 »

mooneater wrote: post #34
billsmithaustin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but running at 7754 tps over an hour with a database of 28M users is easier than with a database of 1B users.

It is much easier to test with a small # of active users and a large (mostly unused) database, than with a large # of active users. To me the title implies 1B active users ("billion user load test").

They are two different problems.

If you have many active users, you're testing for the write load of user tokens and sessions.

If you have many accounts, you're testing for the read load of the account database.

Technically speaking, user id and sessions should be two different database systems, because they have different requirements and they're conflicting.

For the first one, the problem is to have lots of write and enough performances. Plus having the storage if you keep tokens forever (typical for auditing).

For the second one, the problem is to be able to store all the accounts, plus read performances (which can always be hacked by adding layers of caching).

Funfact: if each account is only email + password (64 + 64 char), 1 billion accounts consume 128 GB, just for storing the ASCII characters. A lot more in practise with metadata, empty space and other fields.

They say that they only had 1 maria DB on a single EBS P-IOPS volume. That's kinda weird that a 1 billion users database could fit in that -and zero errors, really?-. Maybe they just had a single integer field (1,2,3,4) to define the user and the password :D

Re: A Billion User Load Test on Healthcare.gov

#50

Post by roninb »

sixbit wrote: post #42
llimllib wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT it's actually a Cigna bug report yeah? Happy to make sure it gets to the right place if I'm wrong. (/me doesn't work for nava, does work on healthcare.gov)

There is a persistent error message on my 2016 profile on healthcare.gov after that button was clicked (despite it also showing it's active on that side of things). My understanding is that the bug is the integration point between the two. From past issues and what I've been told on this one, is that the only way things get fixed and made right is to have healthcare.gov retransmit the correct data/status. Cigna can't…

I'm almost positive you mean "I'll shoot you an email." but the idea of someone being so frustrated with healthcare.gov they want to shoot the messenger (yet still get the problem resolved) is in-line with what I've heard. (and gave me a hearty chuckle)
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