Load testing delays Online Rulemaking’s debut

Although the Transportation Department planned to launch its Online Rulemaking portal this week, the DOT team has found it needs a couple of more weeks to make sure the system that can handle 1,000 simultaneous users.The portal likely will go live by mid-October, which still would be ahead of its December deadline, an Office of Management and Budget official said.During tests, project managers found that the site, which will let citizens find and comment on proposed federal rules, could not handle the planned number of concurrent users. “It wasn’t getting close to what we had hoped for,” the official said. “This was strictly a load testing issue. We should have this figured out by the end of the week.”The project is one of OMB’s 24 e-government projects and is one of about nine that had planned a deliverable by Sept. 30.OMB officials have paid close attention to this project. In May to encourage participation by agencies, OMB director Mitchell E. Daniels sent agency leaders a memo invoking OMB’s Clinger-Cohen Act authorities. Daniels asked agencies to stop spending more than $27 million on nine online rule-making systems and combine resources for this project. Project leaders resubmitted the business case in July with a technical assessment of the disparate systems [see story at ].