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Overall, gov.uk is really well done; minimalistic but works. Some things bug me though, as some services are only available during "open hours" (https://www.bu
by Faaak 10y ago
Overall, gov.uk is really well done; minimalistic but works.
Some things bug me though, as some services are only available during "open hours" (https://www.buysellvehicle.service.gov.uk/sell-private/vehicle-lookup https://www.buysellvehicle.service.gov.uk/sell-private/vehic...): I didn't know that servers needed to sleep.
- twic 10y agoI recently came across a system in a bank that is available from 0800 to 1500 and 1530 to 1700. Apparently it not only needs to sleep, but it takes a tea break in the afternoon.
- aptwebapps 10y agoThe person responsible for the system can hardly be held responsible when they're on a break, can they?
- vertex-four 10y agoThat'll be a web frontend to an old batch-processing system - the backend system will be configured to respond to interactive requests for information during the daytime, and perform some other process in batch mode after office hours have ended. There's quite a few such systems still left in Government, finance, and certain very large companies. Even some "modern" systems - especially in e.g. stock management - will lock their database for hours at a time overnight. Part of the issue is that these systems implement a huge amount of informally defined business logic, making it very difficult to migrate off them.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoCouldn't you run read only during those periods of batch processing with very little change.
- vertex-four 10y agoNot if there's no transactions over the entire batch process - the system is very likely in an inconsistent state.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoFor companies house, say, my naive view is I'd duplicate the companies record at 6pm. There are about 4 million companies. That at least would allow access to basic company information. I can't imagine 4 million tuples of basic text, with indexes and such, would ever be more than 1G in size? Work on the duplicate and then replace the static version at 6am - I'm sure I've overlooked something, interested to know what.
- vertex-four 10y agoSure, you could duplicate the records and work on them - but these are likely to be old COBOL systems working on fixed-width records where the location of everything is hardcoded and the application is covered in global variables. If you're going to refactor one of these applications, you might as well spend the money migrating away from it (into a language the agency can actually hire for). A possibly more doable approach would be to provide a read-only dump into an external SQL database at the end of every batch job for external systems which desire such a thing, but I'm not convinced there's a whole lot of benefit compared to the cost of doing so. There's no part of the agency which needs the information out of office hours, and it's honestly quite reasonable to say "come back tomorrow" in the few cases where the public might want the information out of office hours - note that the web interface is replacing having to call up the DVLA or visit one of their offices, which would have the same restriction. It'd be much more reasonable to spend money and the time of the people who have experience with the system attempting to migrate off it. Hopefully they're trying.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoAppreciate your analysis thanks.