… its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?
I’m going to have a guess and suggest that the website is probably integrated with some much older mainframe system and a batch process or several batch processes run daily overnight to shuttle data between the two systems to keep them updated and in sync.
Syncing the two sets of data while the database is live and changing is a pain the the bum, so they freeze it while the data transfers are taking place.
common government L
…so it would be stupid if this works, but it’s a stupid problem in the first place, so try changing the time on your computer to be within their operational hours.
I recall cheesing videogames with that back in the day, and the UI of a halfway decent videogame would put most govt web design to shame. Worth a shot?
On one hand, this seems unlikely to work because it’s easier to check the server’s clock for the time. On the other, it’d be a mistake to expect the government to take the straightforward option when there’s a perfectly good ass-backwards way to screw it up.
Peak governmental inefficiency.
Not really. The real answer is that different parts of the federal government are underfunded or overfunded according to political ideology and expedience. This is a great example; the SSA is underfunded while the military is overfunded which results in clear performance differences.
You’ll never hear a conservative bitch about the US military saying that it can’t do anything right, and it’s like, yeah, duh, because it has a huge fucking budget and basically gets anything it asks for.
Social safety net programs? Not so much.
… its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?
In case you were unaware, the US government sucks at everything but killing people, and sometimes they take 20yr to do that. They just flat out suck, there’s your “why.”
The hours unavailable:
Day Time Offline Start Stop Monday - Friday 4 hours 1am 5am Saturday 6 hours 11pm 5am Sunday 8½ hours 11:30pm 8am Total 34½ hours/week The first one sounds like “scheduled maintenance” gone awry. Like for something that takes 5 minutes to run that you tell your boss will take an hour, who tells his boss it’ll take two hours, boss then says “let’s double that to be safe”.
I wanna know WHY it is unavailable. Does the system crash if there’s not enough paper in the dot-matrix printer? Are the HTTP responses being filled out manually in real time?
