A year after the ANGEL Course Management System crashed during finals week, Penn State's Information Technology Services (ITS) is taking multiple steps to ensure the site does not have degraded performance as students study this week.
In the past year, ITS has increased server power for ANGEL from 17 servers to 50 servers.
ITS will also temporarily disable certain features such as import and export tools during finals week, ITS spokeswoman Robin Anderson said.
"We've more than doubled the number of Web servers, and we have a larger, faster database server," she said. "We've also developed a list of functions within ANGEL that will not be available during finals week, and that's to manage the load on the system."
ANGEL went offline Dec. 17, 2007 at 2:54 p.m. for about 20 minutes and experienced "intermittent periods of slowness" until 10:39 p.m., according to its.psu.edu. The crash was due mainly to a spike in the Web site's traffic during finals week, Anderson said. The servers overloaded because faculty members were using the system to update courses for the upcoming spring semester at the same time students were attempting to access course information to study for finals, she said.
The overloaded servers spelled disaster for some students who were either unable to log into ANGEL at all or could not complete timed assignments because the site was too slow, Anderson said.
"I tried downloading articles and review sheets for a political science class," Joey Potena (senior-political science) said. "It was annoying, because the last thing you want to do when you're at home is go to office hours to get a hard copy."
Lori Perez (senior-human development and family studies) said she couldn't access syllabi on ANGEL during finals week last year.
"I had to call all my friends who couldn't get it either, and we pulled something together," she said.
More than 76,000 students use ANGEL for at least one course, and on average, students use it for about three courses, Anderson said.
ANGEL is not the only computing service at Penn State that has had problems in the past year.
In November, on-campus Internet access was disrupted for nearly 17 hours. Students trying to log on to the Internet, either from dorms or computer labs, could not access most Web sites because one of the three major gateways Penn State uses to connect to the Internet stopped working. On-campus Internet users were limited to accessing Web sites only within the psu.edu domain, including ANGEL, while off-campus Internet users could not access the psu.edu domain.
Anderson said she doesn't expect ANGEL to crash during finals week, but she added ITS is prepared to deal with any problems that may arise.
"When it comes to technology, nothing is a hundred percent," Anderson said. "We do not expect anything to happen, but we have mechanisms in place to deal with any pressures to the system."
Lexi Belculfine contributed to this report.
