[Patentpractice] failure to "scale" (was PatentCrapper today...)
Carl Oppedahl
carl at oppedahl.com
Thu Mar 27 00:26:11 UTC 2025
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.
On 3/26/2025 4:54 PM, Karen S. Canady via Patentpractice wrote:
>
> 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
>
> T: 310.966.9400
>
> F: 909.494.4441
>
> karen at canadylortz.com <mailto:jane at canadylortz.com>
>
> www.canadylortz.com <http://www.canadylortz.com/>
>
> Confidentiality Notice: This message is being sent by or on behalf of
> a lawyer. It is intended exclusively for the individual or entity to
> which it is addressed. This communication may contain information
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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
>
> Suzannah K. Sundby <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ssundby/> *|* Partner
>
> canady + lortz LLP <http://www.canadylortz.com/>
>
> 1050 30th Street, NW
>
> Washington, DC 20007
>
> T: 202.486.8020
>
> F: 202.540.8020
>
> suzannah at canadylortz.com
>
> www.canadylortz.com <http://www.canadylortz.com/>
>
> Confidentiality Notice: This message is being sent by or on
> behalf of a lawyer. It is intended exclusively for the individual
> or entity to which it is addressed. This communication may
> contain information that is proprietary, privileged or
> confidential, or otherwise legally exempt from disclosure. If you
> are not the named addressee, you may not read, print, retain,
> copy, or disseminate this message or any part. If you have
> received this message in error, please notify the sender
> immediately by e-mail and delete all copies of the message.
>
>
>
>
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