[Patentcenter] Patentcenter does not scale well

[Carl Oppedahl]

In the months leading up to the USPTO's shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web, we 
repeatedly reminded the USPTO's software developers that we were over 
and over again running into aspects of Patent Center that were failing 
to scale well.  The software of Patent Center did sometimes keep up with 
its design needs, especially in the early alpha test days of Patent 
Center when the only users were the alpha testers.  But once the Patent 
Center system was being asked to handle normal numbers of users, again 
and again we were running into situations where Patent Center would fail 
to scale.

Perhaps the most visible example of this was the frequent error message 
"search limit reached".  This happens even when the user (a paying 
customer who is logged in with two-factor authentication) is not doing 
any search at all, but is merely clicking to view a document in a patent 
application that the user had just e-filed.

This problem of failure to scale fell on deaf ears at the USPTO.

PAIR never failed in this way.  PAIR did scale to production bandwidth.  
But PAIR got shut down.

The latest example of Patent Center failing to scale is the complete 
failure when a person files a new patent application and then the user 
tries to download from Patent Center a copy of what the USPTO received 
from the filer.  This is a perfectly natural and normal thing that a 
USPTO customer would need to do.  In PAIR, this was always possible to do.

For a new application that I filed yesterday at the USPTO, today I am 
trying to download from Patent Center a copy of what the USPTO received 
from the filer.   Each time I try, I get an hourglass.  The hourglass 
persists for ten or twenty minutes. Eventually what sometimes happens 
next is a popup window containing a content-free and unhelpful error 
message that says "Error" and nothing else.  Or what sometimes happens 
is that Patent Center simply jumps away from the application workbench 
page and jumps to the home page of Patent Center.

One of the first things that is taught in computer science school is 
that the system designer simply must pay attention to whether the system 
being designed is going to scale well.  This first-year-of-school topic 
got ignored in the design of Patent Center.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4514 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://oppedahl-lists.com/pipermail/patentcenter_oppedahl-lists.com/attachments/20240116/43e191e7/attachment.p7s>