[Patentpractice] failure to "scale" (was PatentCrapper today...)

Wed Mar 26 22:54:46 UTC 2025

I probably should not have done this, but I just couldn’t 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:

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.

I will probably now get audited by the last person still employed at the IRS.

Karen S. Canady | Partner

canady + lortz LLP<http://www.canadylortz.com/>
3435 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 1400
Los Angeles, CA 90010

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F: 909.494.4441

karen at canadylortz.com<mailto:jane at canadylortz.com>
www.canadylortz.com<http://www.canadylortz.com/>
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From: Patentpractice <patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> on behalf of Carl Oppedahl via Patentpractice <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Reply-To: "For patent practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice." <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Date: Friday, March 7, 2025 at 8:58 AM
To: "For patent practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice." <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com>
Subject: [Patentpractice] failure to "scale" (was PatentCrapper today...)

Thank you Suzannah for posting.  There are at least four bad things about this aspect of the PC system.

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.

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 here<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability>.

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.

The red screen shots below prove that the USPTO developers failed at this first-year-of-CS-school task.

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.

A third bad thing about this is the USPTO developers carrying on their by now well-established tradition (see trouble ticket CP34<https://patentcenter-tickets.oppedahl.com/#CP34> 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.

Here is what the error message should actually say:

Database timeout

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.

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 trouble ticket CP178<https://patentcenter-tickets.oppedahl.com/#CP178> 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.

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.

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.

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.

On 3/7/2025 7:16 AM, Suzannah K. Sundby via Patentpractice wrote:
Trying to access eCorrespondence and individual cases in PatentCrapper

[cid:image001.png at 01DB9E67.653035C0]

Suzannah K. Sundby<http://www.linkedin.com/in/ssundby/> | Partner
canady + lortz LLP<http://www.canadylortz.com/>
1050 30th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20007
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F: 202.540.8020
suzannah at canadylortz.com<mailto:suzannah at canadylortz.com>
www.canadylortz.com<http://www.canadylortz.com/>
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