What Is the Limitation on the Number of Questions and Respondents?

The capacity and performance of the 1KA application is considered sufficient in all aspects and can be adapted if necessary. The size of a survey does not present a limitation in any way:

• Number of questions. Thousands of questions can be generated with the application, which is uncommon with a single questionnaire, but appears often in case of complex surveys containing randomized blocks. So far the most comprehensive survey contained 600 entries. For the creation and management of surveys with a larger number of questions, the application considers system performance (PC, mobile and bandwidth capabilities), which results in quicker survey generation response time. In the early stages of development, back in 2009, even a 100 question survey took some time; by the end of 2010, for a survey of 2500 questions, Google Chrome took just 4 seconds. Further optimization in 2013 brought the response time down to 2 seconds for a volume of 5000 questions, after which a gradual slowdown occurs. This slowdown does not apply to key functions of editing: adding and editing questions. Process optimization and technological progress are rapidly increasing performance, so there is practically no limit in questionnaire volume.

• Number of simultaneous administrative users. A test of 50 simultaneous admin users generating a survey was conducted, with no decrease in application performance. An estimate of a thousands simultaneous admin users is considered possible.

• Number of simultaneous respondents. So far, 200 simultaneous respondents participated on a single survey, which resulted in no performance decrease. Simulations in 2013 have shown that a decrease in performance starts with 5000 simultaneous respondents for a specific survey. Decrease in performance is not in any way a limitation of the 1KA application, but rather an issue of the technical limitation of the server’s ability to adapt, which can be addressed by improving hardware configuration to meet increasing demand. The performance and speed of the 1KA application is being monitored and adapted if necessary.

• The absolute number of responses (respondents) to a certain survey. Recent simulations have shown that the application can process tens of thousands of units simultaneously. The most extensive survey to be conducted to date (a nutrition survey of primary school children by the Institute of Public Health) had a volume of 23,000 answers. With such a survey size, only brief slowdown (of a few seconds) is possible for certain statistical analysis.