Although rising juniors could not access Student Central on Saturday morning for about 30 minutes, Administrative Information Services officials said service was restored more quickly than during the last registration session because technicians already had identified the glitch.
Two weeks ago, when rising seniors registered for classes, access to the server crashed for almost two hours. Officials said at the time that they had never seen a problem of that magnitude and that they did not know what had caused it.
Joel Dunn, director of systems and communications for AIS, said what happened when seniors registered was out of the ordinary. The Web server devices that handle requests like registration -- called "buffer pools" of memory -- overflowed with traffic and broke the connection to the server, Dunn said.
Registration resumed after almost two hours, but Dunn said officials later worked with their vendor, Resonate, to prepare for Saturday's rising juniors. Dunn said engineers increased the buffer pools by 150 percent to prepare for last weekend's registration. "It's like adding memory to a PC," he said.
In the first 10 minutes of service Saturday, more than 1,000 students had registered, Dunn said. But shortly thereafter, access to the Web was once again denied. "What happened, unfortunately, was exactly the same problem," he said.
Dunn said that traffic during the initial moments of registration caused the error but that technicians identified the problem and restarted all of the appropriate components. He said it was easier to take action this time because, unlike two weeks ago, the errors did not arise immediately.
At 10:47 a.m., registration resumed and was working faster than it had earlier in the morning, Dunn said. By 11:05 a.m. about 2,150 students had classes. "It was no longer rush hour -- not everyone was trying to get on at the same time," he said.
Although the problems interfered with some students' registration, many students said they obtained their classes easily Saturday morning. "It seemed like everything was going fine at the beginning," said rising junior C.J. Langley.
Dunn said that rising sophomores register April 13 and that AIS is even more prepared for the coming weekend -- AIS will acquire significantly more memory upgrades Monday. Dunn said officials are confident that registration this weekend will run smoothly. "We'll just cross our fingers and hope for the best."
