General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI gotta ask: "Who Built the Affordable Care Act Website?"
As a software consultant, I'm astonished at the issues they are having with the ACA website.
According to a Reuters article on the site's construction, it has some suspect build.
From the article:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw development of the site, declined to make any of its IT experts available for interviews. CGI Group Inc, the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov, is "declining to comment at this time," said spokeswoman Linda Odorisio.
Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems. One possible cause of the problems is that hitting "apply" on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user's computer and the servers powering the government website, said Matthew Hancock, an independent expert in website design. He was able to track the files being requested through a feature in the Firefox browser.
"They set up the website in such a way that too many requests to the server arrived at the same time," Hancock said. He said because so much traffic was going back and forth between the users' computers and the server hosting the government website, it was as if the system was attacking itself.
Hancock described the situation as similar to what happens when hackers conduct a distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attack on a website: they get large numbers of computers to simultaneously request information from the server that runs a website, overwhelming it and causing it to crash or otherwise stumble. "The site basically DDOS'd itself," he said.
Iggo
(47,558 posts)Patience.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)for recent deposits from Koch Industries....
ChisolmTrailDem
(9,463 posts)Response to ChisolmTrailDem (Reply #3)
Richardo This message was self-deleted by its author.
VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)lets just say I know...
Pretzel_Warrior
(8,361 posts)Pretzel_Warrior
(8,361 posts)Pretty good job for a politician, eh? I personally would have gone with aqua page background and red font scrolling marquee.
Richardo
(38,391 posts)Pretzel_Warrior
(8,361 posts)Richardo
(38,391 posts)They don't anymore.
VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)jsr
(7,712 posts)"the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov"
B Calm
(28,762 posts)AtomicKitten
(46,585 posts)I'm sure they will smooth out the glitches as enrollment proceeds. Apparently not even they imagined the glut of interest pummeling the website and phone lines.
KeepItReal
(7,769 posts)Capacity planning and load testing should have been part of their implementation in order to minimize site traffic issues.
underthematrix
(5,811 posts)kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)had all its code written by the low bidders on ODesk.
procon
(15,805 posts)Maybe if the govt wasn't locked into a system of selecting the lowest bidder, things like this could have been prevented. It's a terrible system. Buying on the cheap is fine for some things, but we'll be paying considerably more to bring in the knowledgeable specialists necessary to fix it.