3 ms·

Not to diminish anything but 100 to 200k messages per day is not really huge in relative scale of things. Several private services and government orgs in China

Not to diminish anything but 100 to 200k messages per day is not really huge in relative scale of things. Several private services and government orgs in China and India easily send 10x or more of that number.

robin_reala 7y ago
To be fair, both China and India have over 15x the population of the UK.
SparkyMcUnicorn 7y ago
They never said 100-200k was the limit, but rather that's how many they're usually sending out per day. It could be a limit, but I don't see anything that indicates there's a correlation.
- petepete 7y ago
  Definitely not a limit, on March 28th they sent 637k SMS messages. https://www.gov.uk/performance/govuk-notify https://www.gov.uk/performance/govuk-notify I've used Notify on several projects over the last couple of years, it's a really nice service and has never caused us any problem whosoever.
adrianmonk 7y ago
If the available providers' services start bogging down when you try to actually do it, then it can be considered huge relative to their capacity.
dirtydroog 7y ago
That surprised me too. We handle that amount of HTTP requests per second, and you don't really need a lot of infrastructure to do it. Something is wrong here. I bet it's all synchronous code and capacity is being wasted on waiting. Also, I doubt they're tailoring each individual SMS so there are likely to be efficiencies to be had here too.
- adwww 7y ago
  Instead of betting, you could read the code and tell us. https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api
  - dirtydroog 7y ago
    Is it this bit? https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/blob/e386d2ac38b44ecb341599189befd450def3d73f/app/clients/sms/firetext.py#L85 https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/blob/e386d2ac3... I'd like to clarify that the remark about load handling was aimed at your SMS gateway providers.
mjw1007 7y ago
I don't think the post was intended to be a boast about how many messages they send. I think it was intended to be a description of how it's sensible to set things up at the scale they happen to have.
rospaya 7y ago
The company I work for (one of the largest providers in the world) handles 7+ billion interactions a month. Without checking our systems (and my NDA) I would bet we also provide for a lot of .gov.uk services.

robin_reala 7y ago

To be fair, both China and India have over 15x the population of the UK.

SparkyMcUnicorn 7y ago

They never said 100-200k was the limit, but rather that's how many they're usually sending out per day. It could be a limit, but I don't see anything that indicates there's a correlation.

petepete 7y ago
Definitely not a limit, on March 28th they sent 637k SMS messages. https://www.gov.uk/performance/govuk-notify https://www.gov.uk/performance/govuk-notify I've used Notify on several projects over the last couple of years, it's a really nice service and has never caused us any problem whosoever.

adrianmonk 7y ago

If the available providers' services start bogging down when you try to actually do it, then it can be considered huge relative to their capacity.

dirtydroog 7y ago

That surprised me too. We handle that amount of HTTP requests per second, and you don't really need a lot of infrastructure to do it. Something is wrong here. I bet it's all synchronous code and capacity is being wasted on waiting. Also, I doubt they're tailoring each individual SMS so there are likely to be efficiencies to be had here too.

adwww 7y ago
Instead of betting, you could read the code and tell us. https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api
- dirtydroog 7y ago
  Is it this bit? https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/blob/e386d2ac38b44ecb341599189befd450def3d73f/app/clients/sms/firetext.py#L85 https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/blob/e386d2ac3... I'd like to clarify that the remark about load handling was aimed at your SMS gateway providers.

mjw1007 7y ago

I don't think the post was intended to be a boast about how many messages they send. I think it was intended to be a description of how it's sensible to set things up at the scale they happen to have.

rospaya 7y ago

The company I work for (one of the largest providers in the world) handles 7+ billion interactions a month. Without checking our systems (and my NDA) I would bet we also provide for a lot of .gov.uk services.