Renewing your vehicle tax online

[Platypus]

It just feels a bit...naughty.

Humm clearly your idea of naughty is at a new low. PM me your number and let's see if we can increase your naughtiness levels

[ZARDOZ]

I think this is what was being discussed on R4 earlier today. Some fella was saying they will have an automated refund process in place to cover this sort of thing.

They are paying partial months or stealing it? I would be VERY surprised if they aren't stealing it as previously surrender(when scrapping) only paid for full months.

[Scruff]

I used the "beta" on Monday, to tax my car, WEF today and it took 90 seconds...

The DVLA can collect up to two months tax for a car sold on the 1st day of the month, since you only receive a refund for the months that have not yet started, plus the new owner purchases tax for a full calendar month. An(other) extortion from the motorist.

[Dactylion]

I wouldnt bother even when it is working. Wifie has a personal plate on her old banger and the look up function couldnt find the car despite the fact its been carrying the plate for the last 12 years.

WTFs that about?

It is something pretentious people do!

Normally it is something totally tulip that you need to really squint at and have a vivid imagination to get close to anything other than "sad twunt".

HTH

[Sysman]

Why is that a problem? If its taxed, then it doesn't matter what disc (if any) you have on your car anymore. If checked, it will show up on the database as taxed.

Optimist!

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Optimist!

Well you can always double-check...(when it comes back online):

https://www.vehicleenquiry.service.gov.uk

[tractor]

...

The dashboard for vehicle tax renewals reports the service cost 45.6m to run for the last year.

It died yesterday at 10,000 users and has not been back online since.

Amazon and Ebay eat it for performance.

Even online games support more concurrent users with less problems.

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Even online games support more concurrent users with fewer problems.

[tractor]

"But hold on, I hear you say – the measurements (years, miles, dollars, etc.) are in the plural, so why isn’t fewer the correct choice? Not so! We use less in such cases because we’re actually still referring to total amounts (of time, money, distance, etc.) rather than individual units."

[Sysman]

There are around 30 days in a month, making 100,000 a day, which is less than 250,000 by a good margin.

It would be interesting to see the raw data on that to try and predict likely peak loads.

40 million / 365 / 24 / 3600 gives ~1.27 per second. That assumes an even distribution, which it won't be, but it's hardly a cutting edge rate for transactions per second.

Anyway, do you think they didn't look at the traffic figures for the existing site when planning the likely capacity they'd need? It's just that a load of people who'd normally be spread out over the month are panicking and doing it now because they're too stupid to understand a simple news story they didn't properly listen to anyway about a trivial change in bureaucracy, and thinking they need to do something today or they'll be put in prison and their babies sold to Lithuanian immigrants.

Given that the public is their target I would have thought that yes, they should have assumed the worst.

There's also the "new toy on the desk" effect. Give a bunch of users a new app (or set of apps) and of course they are going to explore all the options on day 1. Where complex searches and the like are involved they'll be hammering the system to a far greater level than once it settles down. Don't underestimate the effect of "Hey Bob, look at this neat new search feature", as the same guy does it for the umpteenth time that day.

Hands up the CUKers who had a peek at the website once reports that it was struggling came in