Here is one reason why Healthcare.gov is so slow

The Healthcare.gov insurance application process is slow and repetitive for multi-person households. It asks the same set of questions about each member of the household -- whether they are applying for insurance or not. Rather than put multiple items on a single form page, the system asks for one or two pieces of information at a time. To proceed to the next question, the applicant must press a  SAVE & CONTINUE  button.




As I proceeded through an application, I noticed the delay between my pressing   SAVE & CONTINUE  and the presentation of the next question was getting rather long -- often requiring I wait 10 to 20 seconds, or more.

Chrome's developer tools confirmed that it is indeed taking taking a long time to submit data with each press of a  SAVE & CONTINUE  button.





Every time I press a  SAVE & CONTINUE  button, the entire application and the results of all processing (data retrieved by back end systems, and history) are resubmitted to the server, and the entire results are then returned by the server. In my case, this was nearly 1 megabyte of data.

The good news is that the response is gzipped, and only about 50 kilobytes. However, the data is sent to the server uncompressed -- nearly 1 megabyte of data each time I progress to a new application question. Nearly 100 of these exchanges occurred as I completed my application.

Submitting the entire application (and results of back end data lookup) at every step slows an already tedious process. It also adds unnecessary load on the Healthcare.gov networks and servers.



This is not how one designs a high-performing web site.

Healthcare.gov asks me to wait longer than it will wait for me

I've been waiting over a half hour. Should I keep waiting?




I eventually gave up. I then logged into the site fresh, and completed all the earlier steps in the form (it makes users mostly start over if there's an issue along the way), and waited again. I've not yet been able to get past this income verification step.

Healthcare.gov is still not handling the load?

Nearly three weeks after launching the online Insurance Marketplace, Healthcare.gov appears to still not be able to handle the load. One moment it works, the next it fails to load. And when it fails, it has been freezing up my browser or taking many minutes to return an error page. Other times, it returns a blank page rather than an error page.

Three weeks may be a short time in government software development, but it is a very long time in Internet time. If you call support, I wish you a good connection as you try to read that 36-character reference ID over the phone.

The Sting of Bing

A few days ago, the Bing team released a new feature -- "a little something special". The background image on Bing was animated. At first, I thought "Cool".

Then the animation got choppy, and my computer got slow.



The animation appeared to be consuming CPU. Both CPU cores were pegged at 100%. Seventy-five percent of the CPU usage was the Chrome process in which Bing was displayed. I close the browser tab and the CPU usage drops and the computer becomes responsive again.

I tried Firefox and Internet Explorer. The same problem occurred. Merely opening the Bing.com home page caused the browser to use up all available CPU, and the computer slowed.

For example, the following shows the CPU usage by Firefox while the animated Bing page was displayed: 60-some percent. This is on a dual core 32-bit system with Windows XP.



When I changed the image to one that is not animated, the CPU usage dropped.



On further investigation, I discover that the CPU usage by the Bing image animation is much smaller on a dual core 64-bit Windows 7 system - yet, a still very noticeable 10 to 25% of the two cores.

Gobbling up CPU and slowing down the client computer are not things I expect from an Internet search engine. It seems a shame for something that is not core functionality to destroy system performance.

Unable to connect to machine

Remote performance monitoring of one Windows 2003 server from another that had been working for many months suddenly stopped working. The only thing that had changed was a local administrator account password on the remote system.

In hopes of getting more information as to why remote monitoring was failing to start, I start up Perfmon and try to create a counter for the remote system. It reports "Unable to connect to machine". I was hoping for something more specific.

So, I try from a Windows 2008 system. It gets slightly more specific with "Access is denied."

While it is generally a good idea to not disclose details about failed authentication attempts, a bit more info could be helpful in resolving this problem.

You may experience performance problems with this amount of crime

@genericlogin: The error message makes me laugh hella hard!





What kind of performance problems? On the web site or while in an area with "this amount of crime"?

Is there some better way CrimeMapping.com could handle and report a high volume of data for a 15-block radius?

Perhaps something like "You may want to avoid areas with this amount of crime." Or maybe there are companies offering personal protection tools and training that would be willing to buy advertising. ;-)

Twitter is stressing out a bit

@yrodr006: Trying to change my profile pic and got this error message. lol



Disabling non-essential features during times of excessive usage can be a good way to manage performance.