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Comment by blntechie | Hacker News Reader

Not to diminish anything but 100 to 200k messages per day is not really huge in relative scale of things. Several private services and government orgs in China and India easily send 10x or more of that number.

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They never said 100-200k was the limit, but rather that's how many they're usually sending out per day.

It could be a limit, but I don't see anything that indicates there's a correlation.

Definitely not a limit, on March 28th they sent 637k SMS messages.

https://www.gov.uk/performance/govuk-notify

I've used Notify on several projects over the last couple of years, it's a really nice service and has never caused us any problem whosoever.

To be fair, both China and India have over 15x the population of the UK.

If the available providers' services start bogging down when you try to actually do it, then it can be considered huge relative to their capacity.

The company I work for (one of the largest providers in the world) handles 7+ billion interactions a month. Without checking our systems (and my NDA) I would bet we also provide for a lot of .gov.uk services.

I don't think the post was intended to be a boast about how many messages they send.

I think it was intended to be a description of how it's sensible to set things up at the scale they happen to have.

That surprised me too. We handle that amount of HTTP requests per second, and you don't really need a lot of infrastructure to do it. Something is wrong here. I bet it's all synchronous code and capacity is being wasted on waiting. Also, I doubt they're tailoring each individual SMS so there are likely to be efficiencies to be had here too.

Instead of betting, you could read the code and tell us. https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api

Is it this bit?

https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/blob/e386d2ac3...

I'd like to clarify that the remark about load handling was aimed at your SMS gateway providers.

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