The Census
Aug 12th 2016, 4:26 pm
#61
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Joined: Aug 2008
Posts: 22,348
Re: The Census
People before today were saying the ABS wasn't ready. In fact the people saying it were ready with news articles on the screwup, ready to run.
Census 2016: The $10 million online census – What went wrong? – EFTM
They paid IBM $10m for this 'solution'. They paid another company $470k for 'load testing'.
Only they only designed it for 1m form submissions per hour.
10m households, maybe 1m paper forms, maybe another 1-2m for outside this evening. That leaves 7m over the course of perhaps 4 hours. In short they didn't even spec it for the right rate number.
And when you get to these types of rates, you can't do simple load testing anyway. Other things start breaking - not least the load balancing, the DNS, and the routers into the servers in places like Telstra.
This time it appears the server for the images in the page was underspeced and started dying at lunch time. Then late this afternoon the base webservers that lead to the census servers were going down. And finally the actual form submission stopped working - pulling it all down.
Hopefully they will sack the entire board of the ABS over this - none of it was a surprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p85xwZ_OLX0
Census 2016: The $10 million online census – What went wrong? – EFTM
They paid IBM $10m for this 'solution'. They paid another company $470k for 'load testing'.
Only they only designed it for 1m form submissions per hour.
10m households, maybe 1m paper forms, maybe another 1-2m for outside this evening. That leaves 7m over the course of perhaps 4 hours. In short they didn't even spec it for the right rate number.
And when you get to these types of rates, you can't do simple load testing anyway. Other things start breaking - not least the load balancing, the DNS, and the routers into the servers in places like Telstra.
This time it appears the server for the images in the page was underspeced and started dying at lunch time. Then late this afternoon the base webservers that lead to the census servers were going down. And finally the actual form submission stopped working - pulling it all down.
Hopefully they will sack the entire board of the ABS over this - none of it was a surprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p85xwZ_OLX0
Aug 12th 2016, 11:04 pm
#62
snɐןɔ ʎʇıuɐs
Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 6,558
Re: The Census
Wow, those figures are real shockers. Imagine spending so much money to develop and test a series of forms with next to no validation. Or more eye-brow raisingly: imagine being paid so much to deliver so little! This census debacle is just another prime example of snouts in troughs guzzling up taxpayers money. There's quite a few projects about doing exactly that right now - several of which nearly everyone involved already knows will be a failure/not deliver the benefits that drove their commissioning.
It's also born of outsourcing by idiots who don't understand what they are doing, but still want to feel 'in charge' of the techies. So the ABS board were saying things that no expert in IT would ever countenance, as was Turnbull (faster, sooner, cheaper turned into slower, later, and more expensive .... and obsolete).
Meanwhile, techie driven companies continue to be the biggest companies out there and drive all new ideas and innovation in the world.
The answer is clear - remove all the MBAs, lawyers, economists and Pol Sci types and replace them with techies.
Aug 13th 2016, 5:42 am
#63
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Thread Starter
Joined: Aug 2008
Posts: 22,348
Re: The Census
Well, most of them can trace things back to the Abbott government. This screwup was born of Abbott cutting the funding to the ABS (so they didn't have enough money to do it right; 2011 census cost $400m). NBN is obviously a massive Abbott/Turnbull born screwup that continues down a dead end path.
It's also born of outsourcing by idiots who don't understand what they are doing, but still want to feel 'in charge' of the techies. So the ABS board were saying things that no expert in IT would ever countenance, as was Turnbull (faster, sooner, cheaper turned into slower, later, and more expensive .... and obsolete).
Meanwhile, techie driven companies continue to be the biggest companies out there and drive all new ideas and innovation in the world.
The answer is clear - remove all the MBAs, lawyers, economists and Pol Sci types and replace them with techies.
It's also born of outsourcing by idiots who don't understand what they are doing, but still want to feel 'in charge' of the techies. So the ABS board were saying things that no expert in IT would ever countenance, as was Turnbull (faster, sooner, cheaper turned into slower, later, and more expensive .... and obsolete).
Meanwhile, techie driven companies continue to be the biggest companies out there and drive all new ideas and innovation in the world.
The answer is clear - remove all the MBAs, lawyers, economists and Pol Sci types and replace them with techies.
