According to government documents obtained by NBC News, Healthcare.gov was stress tested before launch. Response times reached a failure level for the testers at about 1,100 users. On many websites that would be sufficient. But wait a minute…this site was designed to support 50 times that number?!
The Obama administration is quoted in USA Today as saying they expected 50,000 to 60,000 concurrent users for the first few days of the new site’s launch. So what about load testing?
OK, let’s do the math:
- 60k concurrent users expected
- $600 million paid for the development
- Load testing failed at 1,100 users
And the conclusion was: Let’s release it to the public! Shaking my head.
First of all, that is an insult to every taxpayer in this country. It’s incompetency on an extraordinary scale. The contractor needs to be audited for what in the world could have possibly cost $600 million on a web application that can’t handle 1,500 users. It’s unfathomable!
I’m sorry, but something is so very, very wrong in this situation. It is a 100% certainty that I could have assembled a team that could build a high-performance site to handle 100,000 concurrent users for no more than $550 million! LOL
According to Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for HHS, “As we have said many times, there’s no question we wish we had done more testing.”
Tony Trenkle is the Director of the Office of Information Services for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is managing the rollout of Healthcare.gov. Well, he was. Apparently he is the scapegoat for the moment, and the official notice given to the media is that Tony “will leave CMS for the private sector”. Anybody want to hire him on their performance engineering team?
News articles are quoting the government release as saying, “Trenkle’s departure is related to the rollout of Healthcare.gov, but did say the decision to leave was his own.” What? Are you kidding me? They must really think we are stupid. But of course, they think we believe the $600 million was actually spent on the Healthcare.gov site. That, indeed, would be monumentally stupid.