Check-ups prevent system crashes during registration
Registering for classes can be a stressful time for Lee students.
While still bearing the weight that one semester entails, students must begin thinking about the next one: the classes they need to take, the times that they need to take them, and how to work everything else in their schedule around them.
If the system students use to register for classes crashes in the middle of the process, the stress is likely to increase.
This is a problem Lee used to have, but thanks to Performance Health Checks done by IT Systems, they don’t have it anymore.
“[A few years ago], we were having outages in the middle of registration. That’s where we were,” IT Systems database administrator Chad Matthews said.
Matthews said that technological systems, just like people, need periodic check-ups.
Whereas people need a doctor, technology needs Performance Health Checks. While seeing a doctor can keep you from getting sick, the Performance Health Check keeps Lee’s systems from having the technological equivalent: a system outage.
According to Matthews, the goal of the check is essentially to “stress the system out” by simulating what it would be like if all students were doing class searches at the same time. (Class searches are the most time-consuming part of registration).
“It’s similar to a stress test you’d have in a physical examination [at a doctor’s office],” Matthews said.
By pummeling the system with information to compute and tasks to accomplish, IT is able to examine which parts of the system are slowing the process down.
This way, they can fix the individual components without having to buy completely new hardware (unless new hardware is the only thing that will solve the problem).
“The ideal thing is to have someone go in as if they are the only one in the system,” Matthews said. “We don’t want anyone to have to wait. We want them to get exactly what they want.”
These advances in the registration process don’t just help students; they also help the university itself by providing a good first impression for freshmen.
Matthews claimed that a freshman who experiences too many problems when they first come to a university may become too frustrated and want to leave.
“They’ll go somewhere else,” Matthews said.
Performance Health Checks help keep the system in shape so that Lee can attract new students and satisfy the ones it already has.
As Matthews put it, “We are making sure we can handle as much as possible.”