Systems Update, September 2020
Let’s start with the bad news…
Last week we experienced a “perfect storm” of factors, including:
- TRU’s first semester wholly directed toward virtual delivery. Open Learning’s course numbers also at an all-time high.
- Datacentre at UBC reported issues with a number of systems, including Educloud. Overwhelmed by demand, unable to respond with usual speed to requests for additional computing resources.
- Evident popularity of BBB as a lecture system. Many instructors new to TRU and virtual delivery.
- “Hey, it’s the first day, let’s all turn on our cameras and say hi!” (AKA, the handshake problem, where 30 people with cameras on equals 870 video feeds).
- 35000 attempts to connect on Wednesday, September 9.
Equals repeated system failures, frustration, confusion.
The somewhat less-bad news…
Short-term system boosts, reminders to community on usage, have resulted in a more stable BBB system since. But still not at an effective level of performance.
Kaltura video platform had a bumpy upgrade in late August. Is functional, but has been slower than normal, and ongoing issues with machine captioning. These reflect worldwide performance problems. Additional servers were added yesterday.
We had hoped to upgrade to Moodle 3.9 (most recent stable release) on September 7, but system administrator identified potential risks in process and (correctly) stopped it. Will reschedule, but we have to get BBB stabilized first. And upgrades in mid-semester are always a challenge.
The good news.
Work is proceeding on a load-balanced server cluster for BBB in a new server environment.
ITS has been making accounts for Blue Jeans available.
Word is getting out on best practices for videoconferencing.
ITS did move Moodle to a new server environment over the summer, and that system has been performing very well and with no reported downtime.