Waiting for 30 minutes to access the Web site of the Road Safety Authority, the Irish equivalent of the DMV. Too bad they don’t have physical offices where I could queue personally…
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That’s wild, how do they not have the server budget to show you the website, but do have some to show you a queue signup? Surely those take about the same amount of resources!
Queue sign up might be 3rd party, or it is just less bandwidth as a trade off for the main site.
Even if so, the main website needing to queue people is ridiculous.
It does seem to be an external site. Likely, the main site running on a CDN or at least outside their actual infrastructure is informed when traffic is high, so they start redirecting to the queue site.
The queue site starts to create a virtual queue of people trying to visit. The main site requests x users at a time depending on load and queue site then redirects to the actual site with some cookie proving you’re the valid person.
In this way, the load on their site is minimal.
Having said that, just how much traffic does this road safety site generate to need a queue? Is there something that happens this time of year everyone needs to do?
What if they don’t have a web server that can connect to their mainframe, and you’re waiting on a DMV employee to become available to actually handle your requests?
- Some apps are just written badly and won’t scale in a sane way
- Queue it is an external service provider which likely use their own server
lol. They have actually created the same experience online as in person dmv.
10/10. Their IT department is genius
It’s actually a bit better because you can be doing other stuff rather than wait in a line in a physical DMV.
yeah that’s a pretty big oversight tbh. they should make the website play “hold” music and add some “timeout” popups you have to keep clicking
The DMV and other government phone systems nutshell
You’re giving me flashbacks to the online training my work makes me do every year.
I almost failed the first of 7 courses because I made the mistake of trying to do actual work while listening to the training, and didn’t realize there was a 5 minute timer for inactivity on the video player. And no, there was no additional time provided to complete the training. It was mandatory but essentially had to be done on your own time.
It was mandatory but essentially had to be done on your own time.
In the US, if you are an hourly non-exempt employee, that is overt wage theft in all 50 states. If a task is made mandatory by an employer, they must pay you for the time you spent on it.
I know this doesn’t help you now, of course, but it’s good to know in case you run into it again and feel like pushing back with a report to the Dept of Labor.
Stop giving them ideas!
Sounds like the unemployment insurance website here in Florida. I had to use it during covid and it was one of the singularly worst experiences of my life.
That’s the goal. Make government not work, then complain it doesn’t work, let’s either get rid of the whole thing or let some big strong man “fix” everything.
Or privatize it using a friend’s company.
let some big strong man “fix” everything.
Ok I am going to need some context. Is this an internal site? I this a public site? And finally what site?
This is rsa.ie. The main site works fine, but you have to wait to access the driving test registration portal. Mind you, this is even before you see the login or registration screen. And given Ireland’s small size, there are only about 4000 driving tests per week. That number of users is negligible for a normal scheduling page; it must have taken some serious skill and effort to make it non-performant at this scale.
It seems to have just been a really weird way to implement an “under maintenance” page, as the site was planned to be offline this morning.
That actually makes the most sense. It makes you queue because there are only so many tests they can administer at a time. So if the website is offline for maintenance it allows those that tried to access the website first to have their spot saved. Rather then forcing everyone to try and get on the website at once when the matinenece window ends. Now I kinda wish more websites that have limited sign ups did this.
Weird DDoS mitigation?
This is what concert ticket selling sites do for highly anticipated events.
Somehow I don’t think the DMV (or equivalent) would receive the same amount of traffic.
Maybe there are “peak seasons” where everyone rushes onto the server to get something done hours before a national deadline or something? No appreciable traffic 50 weeks of the year year, but total chaos in the remaining two. Not an uncommon thing for certain offices and agencies.
The bad ones…
That’s just crazy. I think they need to increase their server budget.
I bet the constraint here isn’t what’s serving the website but either an external dependency that they don’t have control over so that can’t scale or a relational database that they didn’t have the budget or expertise to scale
Edit: or just that humans have to actually look at it and you’re waiting to talk to one
My local government does it all async to avoid that issue
If it were the US, I’d guess the constraint was political meddling by somebody who wants everyone to hate the agency so they have an excuse to privatize it, but I don’t know if Ireland has that kind of problem.
yeah yeah yeah but how can we get the rage about sensible and rational issues like that???
that’s not a rational issue though. the correct way would be to make the process asynchronous.
Ah sorry, I wasn’t clear - I meant the way the issues were sensibly and rationally outlined!
No thanks, I prefer my internet experience to be linear and iterative with no fail backs for any exceptions. C’mon dead process without an error report!
Nah I’m sure the Raspberry Pi sitting in a manager’s desk drawer is a totally sufficient server. His nephew that’s “good at the computers” even said so!
Do we need to talk about the elephant in the room?
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you probably have no idea what the other people in line smell like
Why pay for more servers when you can tell your users to queue?
Load Balancers everywhere named Samwise: “You mean we don’t have to share the load?”
Better than the system being used by the department of human services in Australia. If the servers and service centres are overloaded, you basically just get told “tough shit, try again later, hope you’re not desperately trying to get out of a DV situation or protect an elder from abuse, cause we’re not paying for more servers”
At least with a digital queue system there’s a sliver of hope that you might get through.
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That’s gonna be a hard no from me, dog.
It reminds me of the people who would turn off their websites at night way back when. Probably because their sites were hosted on personal PCs but still…
I don’t remember this but totally makes sense back then.
Canada’s gov website is still like this. The website has open hours. Try doing anything taxes related late at night.
Reminds me of the SSA website’s operating hours.
This feels like something you would see at the DMV
Honestly, it’s fine. I’d do just about anything to avoid physically going to the DMV.
We’ve been used to having access to websites instantly, but you can’t scale forever. Servers have a real impact on the environment. We’re already using a significant proportion of the world’s electricity on running servers.
Sure, but that’s not what is happening here
