Turbo Tax Melts Down on Tax Day

Raven17 writes "Turbo Tax by Intuit completely melted down under the load from last minute filers. Some people have been having problems as long as 24 hours already. I surrendered 2 hours before the East Coast deadline and schlepped on down to the Post Office."

Comments

Re:Only Fools Wait Until The Last Minute

[Maximum Prophet]

I'm using my poor memory here but there are something like 180 million filers, 60% of which use Tax software or professional help (almost all the professionals use Tax software)

TurboTax should know it's market share, let's pretend it's 75%. That's 180,000,000 * .60 * .75 * .20 = 16.2 million on the last day. Let's say most, 75%, wait until the last half of the day, that's 8.1 million in the last 12 hours. That's 187 per second.

On NPR they gave a figure that the TurboTax servers were processing like 40 per second.

I do peak load extimation for Unix servers for a living. Somebody at TurboTax screwed up big time, real big time. They should have doubled the number of servers they thought they might have needed. They should have contracted with a company like Google to cache the returns, then process them batchwise as fast as they could.