Freshman Joseph Song woke up at 6:30 a.m. on Monday so he could be one of the first students of the day to register for classes. But like many students, Song ran into technical problems with the GWeb registration system that keep him from getting the classes he wanted.
Song said when he tried to access GWeb at 7 a.m., he was kicked off the system and unable to log in again for 15 minutes, enough time for his ideal classes to fill to capacity.
“First I had a feeling of panic and the second feeling was of frustration,” he said. “Whatever I had pre-planned for was completely out of the question because I got none of the time slots I wanted.”
Starting Nov. 10 – the first registration date for spring classes – social media networks like Twitter and Facebook exploded with posts by students of various ages who were unable to log in to the GWeb system when registration began. Despite numerous accounts of both error messages and extremely slow loading times, University Registrar Elizabeth Amundson said the GWeb system did not go down.
“[Information Systems Services] has confirmed for me that there was no system outage either today or last week,” Amundson said in an e-mail on Monday. “Because of the high volume of simultaneous transactions being processed through GWeb Friday morning, the system was dramatically slowed.”
ISS Marketing and Communications Manager Rachel Blevins said although there was no system outage, some individuals experienced a “service outage” and could not log on.
“There was a service outage to individuals trying to log-in,” Blevins said in an e-mail. “Due to the high volume, the server peaked but stayed on, which allowed those already in the system to continue. The error messages were received because new connections could not be established until those in the system logged off.”
Senior Drew Granucci was one such student who suffered from a “service outage.” When he attempted to log in at 7 a.m. for registration, a message appeared on the GWeb system saying the server was unavailable.
“I went on at 7 a.m. and it said the server was unavailable, so I was a little bit freaked out,” Granucci said. “In the meantime, I went on Twitter and saw that people had similar problems and were freaking out online – I knew I wasn’t alone.”
Amundson said despite the slower response time of GWeb throughout the week, 1,244 students successfully registered within the first 33 minutes that GWeb was open on Friday alone.
She added that ISS, which runs GWeb, made adjustments for the freshman class registration days that occurred this week.
“To address the sluggish response time, ISS rescheduled a few processes which normally run between 7 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. for Monday and Tuesday,” Amundson said. “The fewer demands on the system, the quicker it can respond.”
Some freshmen interviewed said they still had trouble logging on and registering for classes Monday and Tuesday morning.
Amundson said ISS plans to install new hardware for the March 2010 registration, which may help with future registration problems.
“The new hardware should be able to handle registration morning volume with less impact,” Amundson said. “The new servers will be in place before fall registration takes place in the spring.”
For students like Song, who were unable to log in during the first few minutes of freshman registration, measures to fix the system went unnoticed and did little to alleviate the pain of next semester’s schedule.
“The school knows that at 7 a.m. they are going to get so many students at once,” Song said. “If they start to make some lame excuse about ‘Yeah, there’s too much incoming traffic’ – to me that’s just B.S. The school is fully capable of making a system that can handle large incoming traffic.”
