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Slowdowns with the Alamo Colleges’ student services page are to be expected with the rush to register early online, but an unforeseen glitch caused a halt in registration Monday and earlier today, the vice chancellor in charge of information technology said.
Jose Avila, land PC technician for district information technology, told The Ranger Monday afternoon that high traffic caused login problems to the student services Web page students use for online registration.
Dr. Thomas Cleary, vice chancellor for planning, performance and information systems, however, said Tuesday that although heavy traffic contributes to slower performance of the student services Web page, the complete lack of service was caused by a problem with the memory of this college’s servers.
Cleary said this college’s server system, which he called a “Flintstones system,” was running at about 98 percent CPU utilization caused by heavy traffic, which led to the memory being maxed out.
The district can plan for high levels of usage and strain on the system, but hardware and software malfunctions, the source of Monday’s setback, are problems that have to be solved on the fly, he said.
To fix the high burden caused by online traffic, he said the district rerouted activity to other servers throughout the district using a priority system.
Since registration was a priority Monday, processing power usually used for other functions was temporarily given to registration activity, Cleary said.
Despite a proactive game plan and regular maintenance on the servers, problems do arise and they cannot always be anticipated, he said.
Cleary said he will be glad when the “Flintstones system” is gone with the implementation of Banner.
The district’s servers had to be rebooted and have a “memory dump” performed on them, he said.
Although the problem originated at this college, the entire district system had to be taken offline because each college server goes through district, he said.
That is to be expected, he said, when a higher-than-usual number of students are trying to register at the same time.
The student services Web page was back online at about 10 a.m. Tuesday, and Clearly said students might have experienced some difficulties but in general the site worked normally.
Cleary said his e-mail was full of complaints Monday, and Tuesday morning a mass e-mail was sent by the help desk acknowledging the problem and explaining that performance issues were being resolved.
For more information on registering at this college, call 486-0700.
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