In the last days before the botched October 1 launch of President Barack Obama's healthcare website, the team in charge was seeing alarming results from performance tests, according to internal emails.
HealthCare.gov was unable to consistently handle 500 users at once in the testing, and tests failed with 2,000 users over a three-day period, according to a series of emails between members of the information technology team at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.
The emails show that behind the scenes, information technology officials were raising numerous concerns. On September 26, Chao said the site needed to be able to handle at least 10,000 or more users at a time.
But three days of testing showed the system flopping at levels well below that.
"The results are not good and not consistent at all," wrote Akhtar Zaman, a system integrator at CMS, describing in detail the hang-ups and errors.
On September 27, David Nelson, director of the office of enterprise management at CMS, said the system was failing because of issues like defective code.
"We have not been successful in moving beyond 500 concurrent users filling applications" he said.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/11/22/usa-healthcare-website-idINDEE9AL05W20131122