November 30, 2013.

As Deadline Expires, Problems Persist With Health Site

Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast, but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.

Technicians in the Washington area raced up to a month-end deadline set by the Obama administration to make the troubled federal insurance website work for a majority of users, but officials acknowledged they still faced a raft of problems that could take weeks or more to fix.

"Have you done this before?"

By Saturday evening, technicians completed a major hardware upgrade, adding computing, storage and database capacity to their data center, said one person familiar with the situation. "There was a big install and it worked," the person said.

"Of course. Hundreds of times----well scores of times anyway."

Contractors believe the upgrades will improve the system's performance and let it handle more visitors, but the person said they are testing the system and aren't yet sure it can handle 50,000 simultaneous users, the administration's stated objective. A few days before the deadline, officials said the site was only able to handle 25,000.