Staff Report
The MyUNM Web site crashed Tuesday morning because about 2,500 students tried to login at the same time, said Moira Gerety, director of ITS Computing.
"The system is appropriately designed to handle what we expect with concurrent users," she said. "But when everybody hit the login screen concurrently, that piece choked."
The system was closed during disenrollment. Students tried to login as soon as the system opened, Gerety said.
"It's reasonable for them to be frustrated," she said. "I would be, too. We take this very, very seriously. We don't want our systems to contribute to students waiting in line."
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
The Web site is a portal for students to register for classes, make payments and check their e-mail.
After the system crashed, ITS restarted the servers and limited the number of concurrent users.
"Then we slowly increased the numbers of concurrent users that were allowed," Gerety said. "Once everybody was logged in, we didn't have any more
problems."
There was no similar problem during the fall disenrollment.
"We haven't gone back that far to see why it didn't happen then and it did now," she said. "We have some behind the scenes technical changes. It's quirky."
ITS has asked the software vendor to find out why the system failed and fix the problem.
The period when students could login after disenrollment might also be spread out over a longer period of time to reduce the stress to the system,
Gerety said.
"We'll try not to have it be such an off-on," she said. "We didn't think more than 2,000 students would hit the login screen all at exactly the same time."
The next test of the system will probably come at the beginning of the fall semester,
she said.
"We're trying to make sure this won't happen again," she said. "If we don't learn, shame on us."
