<story><title>3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-run-of-american-job-growth-has-ended-11585215000</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Demiurge</author><text>As a developer I immediately though of the power of queues. Twenty people trying to submit same form does not work for everyone, but a queue processing one person at a time might allow the twenty people to submit within a short time. It is flattening the curve! If I was contracted to fix this ASAP, I would set up an nginx front-end proxy config that doesn&amp;#x27;t allow more than X sessions and suggest a time in the future when they could try again.</text></item><item><author>luma</author><text>Further, unemployment benefits are managed by the states, and those states are running web services which typically see a few hundred hits a day.  They are now trying to process tens of thousands of new records each day, and at least in MI the service is absolutely not up to the task.&lt;p&gt;My wife managed to get her filing completed a little after 1am this morning.  She was the only one of her 20 coworkers to successfully file, the rest are continuing to attempt to get the state web site to work today, while more people pile in.&lt;p&gt;These numbers are going to get much, much worse.</text></item><item><author>stupandaus</author><text>A few things to note:&lt;p&gt;1. These figures are only new claims as of 3&amp;#x2F;21, so the numbers will get worse.&lt;p&gt;2. This is ~2% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce.&lt;p&gt;3. This is nearly 5x (!) the prior record of 671K new jobless claims from 1982, and redefines the scale for jobless claims. [1]&lt;p&gt;4. This does not account for the countless gig workers that are part of the modern economy that likely did not file for unemployment since they were not covered prior to the passing of the senate bill last night.&lt;p&gt;This goes to show just how sharp of an impact the coronavirus pandemic has had relative to past recessions. Even the &amp;#x27;08 Financial Crisis took MONTHS to unravel.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&amp;#x2F;series&amp;#x2F;ICSA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&amp;#x2F;series&amp;#x2F;ICSA&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>driverdan</author><text>Having worked on this type of application in the past they should find a new company to work with if they can&amp;#x27;t handle this traffic. We were handling hundreds of requests per second with ease 10 years ago. That was with MySQL and the app running on the same server.&lt;p&gt;It doesn&amp;#x27;t take many resources to show the user a form, validate it, and save to a DB.</text></comment>
<story><title>3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-run-of-american-job-growth-has-ended-11585215000</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Demiurge</author><text>As a developer I immediately though of the power of queues. Twenty people trying to submit same form does not work for everyone, but a queue processing one person at a time might allow the twenty people to submit within a short time. It is flattening the curve! If I was contracted to fix this ASAP, I would set up an nginx front-end proxy config that doesn&amp;#x27;t allow more than X sessions and suggest a time in the future when they could try again.</text></item><item><author>luma</author><text>Further, unemployment benefits are managed by the states, and those states are running web services which typically see a few hundred hits a day.  They are now trying to process tens of thousands of new records each day, and at least in MI the service is absolutely not up to the task.&lt;p&gt;My wife managed to get her filing completed a little after 1am this morning.  She was the only one of her 20 coworkers to successfully file, the rest are continuing to attempt to get the state web site to work today, while more people pile in.&lt;p&gt;These numbers are going to get much, much worse.</text></item><item><author>stupandaus</author><text>A few things to note:&lt;p&gt;1. These figures are only new claims as of 3&amp;#x2F;21, so the numbers will get worse.&lt;p&gt;2. This is ~2% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce.&lt;p&gt;3. This is nearly 5x (!) the prior record of 671K new jobless claims from 1982, and redefines the scale for jobless claims. [1]&lt;p&gt;4. This does not account for the countless gig workers that are part of the modern economy that likely did not file for unemployment since they were not covered prior to the passing of the senate bill last night.&lt;p&gt;This goes to show just how sharp of an impact the coronavirus pandemic has had relative to past recessions. Even the &amp;#x27;08 Financial Crisis took MONTHS to unravel.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&amp;#x2F;series&amp;#x2F;ICSA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&amp;#x2F;series&amp;#x2F;ICSA&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JMTQp8lwXL</author><text>Put the web form (plain static assets JS&amp;#x2F;CSS&amp;#x2F;HTML) on a globally accessible CDN. Then use SQS intake for each unemployment application form. Then firehouse it out, wherever it needs to go, at a rate which you can realistically deal with it.&lt;p&gt;Queuing access to the form itself and telling someone to wake up at 4:52 AM so they can then merely access the static assets is a less-than-desirable user experience.</text></comment>