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Safercar.gov Overwhelmed By Recall For Deadly Airbags
darylb writes "The NHTSA's safercar.gov website appears to be suffering under the load of recent vehicle recalls, including the latest recall of some 4.7 million vehicles using airbags made by Takata. Searching recalls by VIN is non-responsive at present. Searching by year, make, and model hangs after selecting the year. What can sites serving an important public function do to ensure they stay running during periods of unexpected load?" More on the airbag recall from The New York Times and the Detroit Free Press.
Is a website buckling under load? Let's publish more articles about it and drive more traffic to their site!
Why should the government be the main source for recall information? Shouldn't that come from the manufacturer/importer?
Pass a law saying car companies must have recall information easily accessible on the web. The extra cost for the companies (which have large splashy advertising sites already, backed by a decent server infrastructure) will be next to nothing. However, this will save the government money; they can just put up a static page with pointers to the individual manufacturer's sites.
Takata, remember when it used to be about the CRAFTMANSHIP, man? Back in the early days, you used to make airbags because you had a PASSION for it. Then the money came, and the drugs, and the women. Pretty soon, it's like you didn't even care anymore about the quality of the airbags. You were just living for the next party, the next line of coke, the next paycheck. The work suffered, man. And you chased off everyone in your life who really cared about airbag engineering and manufacturing. You just pushed them right aside, didn't you? And so now comes the crash.
It's time to rethink things.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
How about building your tech stack so that it can be scaled up/down on-demand? I'm using Rackspace and we have dedicated servers along with cloud servers. I can add or remove cloud servers as needed and also have the load balancers updated.
If you're just doing reads against a database, it's straightforward to add additional replicas (we use MongoDB with replica sets, don't have enough data for sharding yet). If you need to do any processing, then you should build a grid compute system where you can just add additional compute nodes. We're using RabbitMQ along with Celery. Granted, this strategy ignores issues like a saturated network, but our provider is responsible for dealing with that.
What can sites serving an important public function do to ensure they stay running during periods of unexpected load?"
Not be created and run by government which has very little interest in ensuring the success of legislation which has already passed. There's the next election to think about, don't you know and those pesky Republians/Democrats [delete as applicable] are going to destroy the world if you don't vote in our slightly less scummy candidate.
make the car company responsible for every single repair of every single recalled vehicle
Car manufacturers in the US are responsible for repairs.
Or you could be completely wrong about your entire post.. You don't need to build at scale, you need to build it to be able to scale. Meaning that you have separate write and read points for your DB. The read points should be an array, so you can add servers on the fly. The front end should have no dynamic data on it, just hooks to pull from the back end. Means you can independently scale front end for more users viewing, and the back end for more users interacting. When the load goes down, you delete the instances, and remove the IPs from the load balancers and arrays. It's not actually all that hard and it same literally millions of dollars a year for some of the enterprises I've worked with.
Just because you don't know how to do something doesn't mean it can't be done. Just because you'd make a bad design choice doesn't mean that everyone will.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Airbags are for your head, seat belts are for your torso. If you enjoy slamming your head into your steering wheel, go ahead and disable your airbag. Even more fun are videos of an asymmetric head-on collision that favors one side over the other. The test dummies slam their heads into the frame of the car unless you have properly working forward and side airbags.
Unless things have changed dramatically*, there are rules that make it harder to use commercial cloud computing, as not all can guarantee that the services will only be hosted in the U.S.
Almost everything you do in Amazon is by region - certainly any EC2 servers you use directly are. Scaling up to thousands of servers in a region is easier than you think with the tools available now - EC2 is a mature ecosystem these days. Plus there's this, which you may have heard of.
Want a front-end behind a load balancer that adds servers as load grows, and gives them back when is shrinks? There's hardly any coding involved. If you have non-transactional data, like TFA, you just use their NoSQL DB and, seriously, just type the IOPS you need into a box (though it's hard to make that part elastic). For "year make and model"-indexed recall data, that data will all fit in memory on cache servers, so just stand up some memcached (or something more modern) in front of the DB.
This stuff is only hard if you're on a really tiny budget.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So if you refuse to do anything - or the car company says they can't fix your car for another 90 days, your car remains broken.
Chances are you won't stop driving the vehicle until then and they won't pay for a replacement.
Quite a few people ignore the recall and then sell the car to some poor shmuck who never received the recall note.l
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Over a 10 year period from 1990 - 2000 only 175 people were killed by airbags while over 28,000 saved lives can be attributed to the addition of the airbag to the seatbelt. There are also a huge amount of people who still think that seatbelts don't apply to them, and an airbag might actually save them. While we could argue for the cleansing of the gene pool, I'll still take those odds. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=airbag+sa...
I've received a few recall notices over the years for the cars I own. I followed the instructions on the form, made an appointment with the dealer, dropped the car off, then they did their thing. I never had to pay a dime.
You might be confusing a recall with a technical service bulletin. They are not the same, although a TSB can turn into a recall in certain cases -- and that happened in one case, for which I was refunded the money I'd paid for the service. All the recall notices I've received have had language on them to this effect, that if you repaired the car on your own dime (and can product a receipt) that they will reimburse you.
And if you buy a used car, it's probably worth the time to check for recalls. It's a similar situation for any consumer product you might pick up off Craigslist or from a private sale. We have a couple of kids and children's products are also notorious for this, since there's quite a "hand me down" / "cash sale" market that exists when your kids outgrow something and you don't need it any more.
Any critical system should run at 90% idle if it is going to handle peak demands. When the bean counters insist on scaling based on average load instead of peak usage, things always come crashing down.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.