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Campus Solutions Performance

08 Jul 2010

Project Communication, July 2010

Following the serious performance issues experienced with Campus Solutions during September 2009 registration, a major project has been under way to investigate, address and improve system performance in advance of 2010 registration. This has been the major priority for all those working with Campus Solutions and has involved a significant number of people from IT Services, many other areas of the University and specialist consultants from the US.

The project has focussed on a number of strands which have the most impact on performance during registration:

  • Student Financials and Financial Aid – these areas, supporting both the payment of tuition fees and bursaries, were the source of the problems encountered during 2009 registration
      
  • Housekeeping and archiving of data – this involved purging obsolete data from previous years, so freeing up the system to process current information more effectively
      
  • Batch processes, queries and reports – fine tuning these processes and activities to make sure the system can deal with large amounts of data involved
      
  • Performance monitoring tools – installing new tools to give us better real-time information about system performance and enabling potential problems to be pinpointed before they become major issues
      
  • Load testing – simulating a period of heavy demand, similar to that experienced at registration, to make sure that the system can cope

Whilst work will continue up to and beyond September 2010, we can report that significant progress has been made over the course of the year. A number of system changes have been implemented around Student Financials and Financial Aid to resolve a range of issues which were impacting on system performance, including so-called Orphaned Entries and Charge Priorities. We have fine-tuned a number of processes to optimise their performance and implemented monitoring tools to give us greater visibility on system performance. There has also been significant work undertaken on data cleansing and purging.

During the second half of May, we undertook an extended period of load testing, during which we simulated the key events and activities of registration with appropriate combinations and volumes of transactions being fed into our test system automatically by a specialist testing consultancy. The results of these tests have been fully analysed and show that, following the changes made above, the system can cope with relatively high numbers of concurrent users doing a mixture of registration processes. In the test environment, the system was able to cope with over 800 concurrent users undertaking a range of registration processes and this compares with the maximum peak usage of 578 during previous registration periods. Obviously, the tests cannot duplicate registration exactly but we believe these results give us confidence that system performance during September will be much improved.

Other potential changes have also been identified for 2010/11 which, whilst less relevant to the immediate objectives, are none the less important to the use of Campus Solutions in the future.

While we are confident that system performance during September 2010 registration will be much improved, we cannot be complacent and in the run-up to September, we will continue to refine our understanding of system performance and develop clear guidance for users on how to get the best out of the system. Load-testing has given us some useful benchmarks on system performance, against which we will be able to closely monitor system performance and we will be ready to take early action should there be any signs of deteriorating system performance.

For further information, please contact: