Last Wednesday, many students lined up inside Alamance to register for classes manually while OnTrack was down for several hours.

Chris Fulkerson, assistant vice president for technology, said he was in a meeting at around 9:20 a.m. when he started getting phone calls that the system was down.

OnTrack, a creation of Datatel, is the university’s “Web front end;” basically a way to access information and conduct registration online.

On Wednesday, OnTrack slowed down and stopped twice, once after a reboot, but the rest of Datatel was running fine, according to Fulkerson.

“People want information and an e-mail right away, but I don’t know what to tell them sometimes,” Fulkerson said. He didn’t have enough information to explain the situation until after a 5 p.m. meeting with technology staff members and the Registrar.

“It took a while to get information from the Datatel technicians and our staff,” he said.

Some people didn't experience any problems with registration on OnTrack. It was only when more than 100 people logged on that the system, “came to a crawl and stopped," Fulkerson said.

“I've been here for four years and this has never happened,” senior Rob Olson said.

Datatel programmers made corrections to the system until 9 p.m., but they could not test the system’s capability to handle the number of people that would use the system during registration times.

Trevor Kelly, applications/Web programmer, said he and his colleagues, “basically applied a bunch of tweaks to the system.”

They removed all Datatel users from the site at 2:45 p.m. and restarted the database. They also added another “listener,” or channel, for the database to “listen” to just OnTrack requests.

“The reason this registration was so much different,” Kelly said, “is that Release 18 [the newest version of OnTrack], which we upgraded to in May, has so many more listeners and the only chance to test it was yesterday. Release 18 has a lot of benefits with its architecture, but it took a toll on performance.”

Kelly and his colleagues expanded the amount of processes that could run simultaneously on the site from 128 to 512, borrowing the extra processes from Datatel.

“They clamped down on the rest of the university using the system so that students could use more,” Fulkerson said.

At 7:30 a.m. Thursday, 150 to 160 people registered in seven minutes, according to Fulkerson, a sign that the system was working correctly.

Friday morning the time display on OnTrack was represented in the wrong time zone. Fulkerson said this did not affect anyone’s registration, because the actual time was correct.

News Editor: Kaitlin Ugolik - 11/14/07