Further performance problems have been evident with one of the two Succeed servers on Wednesday morning, 8th October, Sunday afternoon, 12th October, and Monday morning, 13th October. The issue on the 8th & 13th is highly technical in nature but the upshot is that the server suffering from the problem (always the same one — learnapp2) is very slow. The other server is running fine and delivering perfectly acceptable performance. Whether you suffer the problem is entirely random but if your sessions are connecting to the slow server, performance is poor.

On Sunday, Learnapp2 for reasons that we don’t understand suddenly jumped from 20% processor utilisation to 80% in a 3 minute period between 16.05-16.08. After 16.08, performance would have been poor. The server was restarted on Monday morning to fix the utilisation problem and immediately the second issue occurred (the same one as the previous Wednesday). This server was restarted again at 14.00 which cleared the problem. The delay was made in the hope that we could find a solution to the problem before doing the restart. Unfortunately, no solution has yet been found but after 14.30 on the Monday 13th both servers are running properly and providing a good service.

The problem on Learnapp2 has been under investigation with Blackboard since the 8th.

Having increased the hardware available to run Succeed last Wednesday morning (1st October) due to the slow performance it has been interesting to look at the usage figures for the previous week (29th September – 3rd October) and compare them with the same week in 2013 (30th September – 4th October). To measure usage we will take logins per hour from the Portal (the main access route to Succeed). This excludes mobile and direct logins but should provide a reasonable basis for comparison. Also note that the figures quoted below are for one of the two applications servers (learnapp1).

Perhaps the most interesting figure that the peak number of logins per hour for 2013 was 591 and in 2014 – 1027, an increase of 73% – the 1027 logins occurred between 9.00-10.00am on Monday 29th September. Unsurprisingly such a huge increase in demand caused major problems with the servers. Over the week in 2013, there were 26,384 logins whereas in 2014 this increased by 16% to 30493. This increase was not evenly spread across the day but was concentrated in the 09-18 period. Logins across the week in the 09-18 window increased from 17749 to 21899 (23%).

The graphic below shows the daily 09-18 logins for each day

As noted in the previous posting on performance, the additional processing power on the servers (8 processor cores to 12) should help Succeed handle the increased workloads that we experienced last week and fully expect to experience in the coming week!

Succeed’s performance in the mornings this week has been slow. On Tuesday we did some diagnostic work to identify where the bottlenecks were amongst the servers that form Succeed (load-balancers, application servers and database server). We identified the application servers as the part of the system that were struggling most — they both had very high processor utilisation figures. This morning (Wednesday, October 1st) we increased the CPU cores on both application servers from 8 to 12 and hopefully this will improve the performance of Succeed. This in itself generated an issue on Wednesday as one server grabbed all the traffic and then couldn’t handle that level of traffic and started behaving very strangely. This was resolved late in the morning and the service should be a quicker in the mornings and for the rest of the day from now on.

The reason that Succeed has been struggling is because of a big increase in the usage of the system during the day. The peak usage has increased by over 40% from last year — a considerable and unexpected increase. We suspect this is related to the new wireless infrastructure and the ease of connection that it offers.

Staff should be aware that Internet Explorer 9 performs very poorly when used with Succeed and eLD recommend that an upgrade to IE11 (as the student computer labs have already been done) is performed on University equipment unless you are keeping to IE9 for specific reasons. To check your version of IE:

Help -> About Internet Explorer

To upgrade to IE11, use Run Advertised Programmes:

Control Panel -> Run Advertised Programmes -> Microsoft Internet Explorer -> Run

Ensure that you have closed any running IE9s before you start. IE11 isn’t perfect when used with Succeed but no browser is!

There were some performance issues on one the of the Succeed servers today, staring around 1.40pm. The affect of this can be odd in that a person in the next door office or the student sitting next to you experiences perfectly acceptable performance whereas for you Succeed is slow — it all depends on which of the two servers your session is allocated too. The server we call learnapp2 started to struggle around 1.40pm. At the moment we don’t know why is was the case although it is possible that simply too many users were accessing the system. We are investigating the cause(s) with Blackboard. At the time of writing 6.40pm learnapp2 is still struggling.

Most Succeed spaces will have a link to the Course Representatives tool (usually in Module Administration). As a student you can use this link to put yourself forward as a course representative and your fellow students can contact you via the same link. In some courses there may be elections if many students put themselves forward.

The latest release of Succeed has been successfully installed and a number of new features are now evident. The most obvious is the Resources tab containing information from the Library and Careers (with more to come). The Library section contains information that used to be housed in individual modules but the new tab method means that updating the information is considerably easier as only one tab needs updating whereas previously each module needed editing which meant we could only really make changes between semesters when the new modules for that semester were built.

There is also a new panel on the ‘My Succeed’ page ‘My Organisations’ which is very similar to ‘My Modules’. This new feature of Succeed will be used for non-module spaces, e.g. the information spaces that many schools and divisions make available to their students. Thus ‘My Modules’ will eventually contain just academic modules and all other content will be available via ‘My Organisations’ (or possibly the new tabs). Note that we have also changed the wording to have ‘My Modules’ instead of ‘My Courses’

For staff, the new student view is the most significant additional feature. This is a proper student view that allows taking of quizzes etc. not just the ability to see what a content area looks like to students (which switching off edit mode does). See this post for further details.