We decided to share our experience in testing and participating in the preparation of the portal for providing services to the public.

Hello, everyone! Because of the quarantine in Russia, the receipt of government services in electronic form has increased, and not all portals providing such services have appeared ready. We decided to share our experience in testing and participating in the preparation of the portal for providing services to the public.

In Russia, a two-level model for the provision of public services has developed — Federal portal gosuslugi.ru and portals of regions where local services are provided (most often for social assistance and services of local state and municipal institutions — education, medical institutions).

Popular Portal — The President of the Russian Federation has appointed support payments for each child (and there are 27 million of them in Russia), for which you need to apply on the Federal portal for public services gosuslugi.ru. You can imagine what happened when parents of all these children simultaneously rushed to fill out applications on this portal!

Watching all this, we decided to recall the experience of our ION DV.Framework team [iondv.com] in testing and participating in the preparation of a regional (as at the state or province level) portal providing the ‘School admission’ service.

How did we pass this challenge, and what were we preparing for? Read more about our experience below, which will give you an opportunity to look at the issue of public service portals during peak periods.

Let’s start by getting to know each other a little. We are a team of IONDV developers and analysts with more than six years of experience working on projects, which we develop on our platform —  read about it in another article. There were several teams that were working in the process of preparation for the peak school admission period, which performed the following functions: the data center operator, the operator and the developer of the regional portal information system, the operator and the developer of the integrated education information system, technical support for the users of the regional portal. Our IONDV team was responsible for performing the last task, independently monitoring the health of the portal, and supporting users.

Our role in preparation was to organize load testing, recommendations on caching configurations in Nginx before the information system, and we also prepared instructions for users with the recommended ‘behavior.’

But Why Is This Such a Big Deal?

(For those who don’t know about the problem of school admission in Russia)

School education in Russia is free for all children. Children are distributed to schools according to the place of official registration of residence of parents (and children). But not all schools provide the same quality of education. In many large cities in Russia, there are several municipal schools that are difficult to enroll in because of too many applicants.

The reasons are different. Some schools consistently produce children with high scores on the final exam (similar to SAT); others use special programs of education and others give some skills that are highly valued by parents (e.g. English language or focusing on math, and sometimes — especially known for the good primary school teacher). Or some schools are located in areas where the number of houses assigned to the school is large, the school itself is small, and the other nearest school is located behind a large highway or a half-hour walk for a child.

In order for a child to be enrolled in this school, he or she must be registered in houses that are related to the school. But if a family lives in a house that isn’t assigned for the desired school this might not stop parents, they are ready to register in someone else’s housing for money (rent according to documents without living) or even buy apartments with the necessary addresses in which they register themselves. Therefore, the excitement is also fueled by the already produced costs of time and money.

In many regions, school admission is organized in electronic form in parallel with taking paper applications, but with some difference in time. For example, in Khabarovsk this year, electronic applications receiving started at 0:00 a.m. on January 26 and paper applications admission at schools started at 10:00 a.m. Obviously, applying in person means being at the end of the line. Last year, the admission started simultaneously at 10:00 a.m., but this did not solve the problem of queues — parents were still making lines, fearing that the portal would fall down or something would break.

Usually, recording in the traditional form was carried out in the form of round-the-clock shifts and queuing. Sometimes this situation even provoked fights between parents in queues. And the prospect of many hours or even days of waiting at the school doorstep in winter in 30 degrees of frost makes the possibility of applying online for admission to school an essential option.

Popular Service Resource As a Technical Task

The problem with services like ‘school admission’ in the integral load indicator (or query probability) tending to the ‘Delta function’ (δ-function, Dirac function) is clearly visible on the charts as a peak. At this point, there are multiple increases in requests in a short period.

#javascript #load testing #node.js developer #node