This week, Ann included this great "kudos" from the Registrar's office, to OIT:
“Mary Koskan announced that system performance was good during registration. There were 11,000 students registering the first day of the queue. One Stop has been working with OIT on ensuring that performance during registration is good. During registration for spring 2009, 87 percent of students were completing registrations within 5 seconds or less. On April 14, 2009, 98 percent of students were completing transactions within 5 seconds or less. This has been a good partnership with OIT. One Stop is still looking at the registration queue for spring 2010; they are discussing adding more times and spreading out the load but this will only happen if it’s really going to make a difference.”
I'd like to call out that number for you: 98 percent completed within 5 seconds. That's an amazing statistic! The business logic behind an online registration can be very complicated - and 5 seconds is very fast.
Lots of effort goes into making a smooth student registration. For those of you who have been with OIT for a while, you may remember the problems we had with online registration in 1999 when the PeopleSoft system first went live, along with the "Whistler" web registration system. Since then, the web developers have put in a ton of time re-working the application to make it run smoother and more reliably.
But there's more to an application than just the program itself. You are probably most aware that system support plays just as important a role. Systems administration runs the servers that directly support the application (tools run on our Windows servers, the web registration system runs on Linux, app servers run on Solaris). Systems DBA supports the database infrastructure, the storage and backup team provide the space to use. The Automation team ensures that all systems are monitored, and that the appropriate staff are notified if we experience a problem. The Scheduling team supports the job scheduler that, among other things, helps the right data make it to the right places at the right time.
You all helped to make this a smooth student registration period, and I want to thank each of you for that. Thank you!
