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<p>Yes I always fill out the survey, starting with the big prominent
"thumbs down" at the start of the survey. My responses go
downhill from there.<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/26/2025 4:54 PM, Karen S. Canady
via Patentpractice wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:54284B13-138C-4320-996A-39672C133994@canadylortz.com">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span>I probably should not have done this,
but I just couldn\u2019t help myself. Today, I encountered the
common glitches while filing a provisional and decided to
answer the USPTO survey questions. I put the following in
the comments box near the end:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>I initially got started OK, but then
received various error messages ("search limit reached").
After much clicking around, I was able to get in and access
my saved application for filing. Then in the middle of my
filing, I got logged out of Patent Center and had to log
back in. There was much glitching and blank screens, but
nevertheless I persisted, and eventually succeeded in
getting my filing receipt and paying the filing fee. Wow,
our government can afford to pay a teenager named big balls
to destroy our systems and fire all kinds of senior talent,
but can't afford decent IT support for what should be the
world's greatest patent system.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>I will probably now get audited by
the last person still employed at the IRS.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Karen S. Canady</span><span> </span><b><span>|</span></b><span> Partner</span><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span><a
href="http://www.canadylortz.com/"
title="http://www.canadylortz.com/"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span>canady + lortz</span><span> LLP</span></a></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span><a
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title="mailto:jane@canadylortz.com"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span>karen@canadylortz.com</span></a></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span>From:
</span></b><span>Patentpractice
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:patentpractice-bounces@oppedahl-lists.com"><patentpractice-bounces@oppedahl-lists.com></a> on
behalf of Carl Oppedahl via Patentpractice
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:patentpractice@oppedahl-lists.com"><patentpractice@oppedahl-lists.com></a><br>
<b>Reply-To: </b>"For patent practitioners. This is not
for laypersons to seek legal advice."
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:patentpractice@oppedahl-lists.com"><patentpractice@oppedahl-lists.com></a><br>
<b>Date: </b>Friday, March 7, 2025 at 8:58\u202fAM<br>
<b>To: </b>"For patent practitioners. This is not for
laypersons to seek legal advice."
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:patentpractice@oppedahl-lists.com"><patentpractice@oppedahl-lists.com></a><br>
<b>Cc: </b>Carl Oppedahl <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:carl@oppedahl.com"><carl@oppedahl.com></a><br>
<b>Subject: </b>[Patentpractice] failure to "scale" (was
PatentCrapper today...)</span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
</div>
<p>Thank you Suzannah for posting. There are at least four bad
things about this aspect of the PC system. </p>
<p>First, the USPTO developers very predictably failed to design
the system so that it would "scale". At the outset of system
design, the developers unfortunately made initial design
decisions that were just barely good enough to support the
small number of alpha testers (of which I was one and other
listserv members were also). Later when the system got
opened to beta testing, these "search limit reached" notices
started popping up every now and then. And then of course
when PAIR got shut down, this forced all USPTO customers to
shift their work to PC, and the "search limit reached" notices
became commonplace.</p>
<p>In the first year of a computer science curriculum, one of
the first-year courses always addresses the need for a
software developer to plan ahead about this. If the eventual
bandwidth required to handle a production environment is at
some (in this case very predictable) level, then the design
decisions back in alpha test need to be made so that the
system can eventually "scale" to that level to serve
production needs. This need for a designer to pay attention
to scalability has its own Wikipedia article that you can see
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability"
moz-do-not-send="true">here</a>.</p>
<p>It would have been prudent for the USPTO developers (back in
2018) to carry out simple measurements on PAIR to see how many
queries per second got made by paying customers, how much data
had to be served up per query, and how big the peak loads
would get. I'd guess the USPTO developers failed to do that.
And with PAIR having been shut down a year ago now, there is
now no opportunity to carry out such measurements on PAIR.</p>
<p>The red screen shots below prove that the USPTO developers
failed at this first-year-of-CS-school task.</p>
<p>A second bad thing about this is the developers having failed
to take proper account of the different service standards
applicable to paying customers on the one hand, and to
non-paying general members of the public. The former are easy
to spot because they have logged in with a user ID and
password and two-factor authentication, linked to customer
numbers with dozens or (in Suzannah's case) thousands of
fee-paying patent applications. To the extent that (due to
poor system design) there is some need to treat one user
differently from another, the last thing that should happen is
that someone who (like Suzannah) has paid half a million
dollars in government fees in recent months should have her
service quality pushed down in favor of some other user.</p>
<p>A third bad thing about this is the USPTO developers carrying
on their by now well-established tradition (see
<a href="https://patentcenter-tickets.oppedahl.com/#CP34"
moz-do-not-send="true">trouble ticket CP34</a> reported in
the year 2020) of picking the wrong words for important parts
of the PC user interface. Here, the developers characterize
the bad thing that happened as a "Search Limit" that was
"reached". But Suzannah was not "searching" at all. She was
looking at the documents page for one of her own patent
applications (in which she had paid thousands of dollars'
worth of government fees). And she was clicking to view or
download a document from that patent application. She was not
"searching" at all. There should be no "limit" on the
activity of a paying customer clicking on a document in the
customer's own application file.</p>
<p>Here is what the error message should actually say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Database timeout</p>
<p>The database is unfortunately unable to keep up with user
needs. We apologize for the inconvenience. We have logged
this failure and we will try to address it soon.
Unfortunately your only choice is to try again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A fourth bad thing is the failure of the USPTO developers to
have addressed their failure to "scale". It has been more
than a year now that USPTO customers have been reporting these
"search limit exceeded" failures to the EBC (see
<a href="https://patentcenter-tickets.oppedahl.com/#CP178"
moz-do-not-send="true">trouble ticket CP178</a> reported in
the year 2023). And even if not even a single user had
reported such a failure, a responsible developer would have
been logging these failures and would have been taking action
based upon the logs. But even now, the developers have not
fixed this element of bad system design.</p>
<p>The USPTO hasn't shared its system design for PC. One could
imagine that maybe the relevant portions of PC are in a cloud
such as AWS. If so, then it turns out these things are quite
fixable. You go to your user interface for your cloud, and
you find the "bandwidth" knob, and you turn it up from 5 to 8
or whatever. Yes, you will then get charged a little more
money, but then the cloud will keep up with your actual
bandwidth needs. That is one of the good things about hosting
a system in a cloud, you can turn these knobs up and down as
needed and you can avoid paying unnecessarily for more of any
particular computing resource than you actually need.
</p>
<p>I suspect the USPTO developers chose to host the relevant
portions of PC on self-hosted physical servers in some USPTO
facility in Virginia at some distance from the Alexandria
campus. This means that the bad system design decisions that
date from the days of alpha testing (back in the year 2018)
are "baked in" to the system, and very hard to change. Maybe
this particular recurring system failure could be traced to
some single point of bad design, like an ethernet link running
between two boxes that should have been gigabit ethernet but
was only implemented as 100base-T ethernet (ten times
slower). If that had been the mistake, then it would be
readily fixable by swapping out the slow ethernet ports for
gigabit ethernet ports, and standing back to see the system
work much faster than before.</p>
<p>But I suspect that the elements of bad system design, dating
from the alpha test days, are pervasive rather than
single-point. The dozen or so file servers and software
servers that make up this portion of PC were probably badly
chosen across the board. Probably now in 2025 it would not
even be possible to correct the system design by throwing more
money at the existing servers; swapping out this server or
that server with an upgraded server that is (say) 20% faster
(and costs twice as much money) would not meaningfully reduce
the number of (misnamed) "search limit reached" error
messages. No, what needed to happen back in 2018 was picking
some completely different topology for the servers and making
completely different decisions about how to architect the
underlying databases. That didn't happen in 2018 and now the
failure to scale cannot be fixed now in 2025 just by little
tweaks here and there.</p>
<p> </p>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal">On 3/7/2025 7:16 AM, Suzannah K. Sundby
via Patentpractice wrote:</p>
</div>
<blockquote>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal">Trying to access
<span class="spelle">eCorrespondence</span> and individual
cases in <span class="spelle">
PatentCrapper</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><img width="286" height="579"
id="Picture_x0020_1"
src="cid:part1.ryewMVII.USnXLt9O@oppedahl.com" class=""></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a
href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/ssundby/"
moz-do-not-send="true">Suzannah K. Sundby</a>
<b>|</b> Partner</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.canadylortz.com/"
moz-do-not-send="true">canady + lortz LLP</a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">1050 30th Street, NW</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Washington, DC 20007</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">T: 202.486.8020</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">F: 202.540.8020</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a
href="mailto:suzannah@canadylortz.com"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">suzannah@canadylortz.com</a></p>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.canadylortz.com/"
moz-do-not-send="true">www.canadylortz.com</a></p>
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<br>
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