[Patentcenter] Patentcenter does not scale well

[Katherine Koenig]

This is very sad.  The other day I filed two applications.  Neither immediately appeared after filing, as you describe, but one did appear by the next morning.  I called the AAU to ask about the second one (I called at 8:30am, as soon as AAU opened, and still was on hold for nearly 45 minutes).  I was told that "it appears that the application got stuck in the back-end of Patent Center."  She escalated the issue and messaged some IT person who could help, and it did show in my workbench within 24 hours.  She assured me that this kind of thing happened in PAIR as well, and that it's random, and that there's nothing we can do to prevent it from happening again.  I never remember this issue in PAIR, but perhaps I just never experienced that luck of the draw.  Has this happened to anyone else while using PAIR, or is it a Patent Center thing?

Best regards,

Katherine

Dr. Katherine Koenig
Registered Patent Attorney
Koenig IP Works, PLLC
2208 Mariner Dr.
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316
(954) 903-1699
katherine at koenigipworks.com


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-----Original Message-----
From: Patentcenter <patentcenter-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> On Behalf Of Carl Oppedahl via Patentcenter
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2024 4:41 AM
To: users of Patentcenter <patentcenter at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com>
Subject: [Patentcenter] Patentcenter does not scale well

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.