After a great deal of research, we believe we’ve finally hit upon a solution to improve the responsiveness of Blackboard. We made the change yesterday, and immediately saw great gains in some of the most problematic areas such as the login page and the discussion boards.
Please let us know if you’ve seen the difference, and if you notice other areas of Blackboard that could use improvement. There’s still plenty of work left to improve.
February 6th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
What was the solution? An app acceleration box, like F5? Thx.
February 6th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
The solution was actually a nuanced application of Oracle tuning knowledge. I’ve posted a lengthy explanation of what we did at the URL below
http://proxy.usf.edu:81/notes/oracle_fix1.html
February 17th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Tonight, Feb. 17 (and all day that I have been trying to get on), what usually takes me 5 minutes is taking upward of an hour. What is happening? The performance is dreadful.
February 18th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I have been trying to get on blackboard since 9 a.m. It is now 2:30. What is going on??????
February 18th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
What the #$@! is going on with blackboard?! I NEED to get on it to do homework! Thanks for such a great system with all your stupid updates. All it has done is screwed up a horrible system even more.
February 18th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
What is going on with USF’s Blackboard? I cannot access my course materials. All attempts to access the site over weekend have failed. I’ve spent countless hours - to no prevail.
I thought USF would be sophisticated enough to provide internet access and monitoring throughout the weekend… is USF not providing the correct funding, support, and IT structure to provide their students?
Is the student’s time and reliability of access to posted course material on Blackboard of any importance to USF?
February 18th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
why has blackboard not been working for me, but it has been for others??? I have assignments to turn in, and you can’t expect us to work around when blackboard feels like working!!
February 19th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
The problem the weekend of Feb 17-18 was a combination of many things.
1) The power problems the campus experienced Thursday Night fried the motor that powers our Air Conditioning in the server room. In order to avoid overheating the production BLackboard and Mail servers, we turned off all other non-essential servers to conserve what little cool air we got from the rest of the Library.
2) On Saturday, one of the nodes in the Blackboard cluster experienced problems due to the heat. Even though the monitoring software picked up on the problem, the message was lost among the noise of all the messages from all the other servers that were turned off due to the heat.
3) The load-balancing software was not able to detect the problem and correctly route around that bad server. That is why some people were unable to use Blackboard while most others were. The load-balancer was still routing some people to the bad application server.
The problem server was finally noticed around 8pm Sunday, and the problem was then corrected.
March 19th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Re: The Sluggish Performance
The solution did not take on Blackboard in any area that I use, Announcements, Assignments, Course Documents, Gradebook, Test Manager. In fact, in the last ten days it has gotten worse and worse, especially the transitions to and from Gradebook.
Students are reporting long wait times to the point of being timed out of quizzes.
Is there something I need to do at this end to rectify or shorten the wait times. Please and thank you. mjl
April 4th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Is this the cause of the very sluggish performance when taking quizzes as well? I was thoroughly unimpressed with the quiz load time. I had 45 minutes to complete 55 questions and it was taking up to a full minute to load between questions. I lost many points due to time constraints.
I have a high-speed internet connection so this was not the problem. I hope this is not the normal speed the system moves. If so, I will not be partaking in any more online classes.
-Thank you
April 6th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
What solution? I have noticed no improvement whatsoever. In the areas I use most (Assignments, Announcements, Course Documents, and Gradebook) the system seems to work at two speeds - slow and pond water. I, too, have a high speed connection as well as a high speed machine so I know the problem is not on my end. I find it very difficult to fathom why USF is lagging so far behind on a system that is supposedly in place for the benefit of their students.
April 9th, 2007 at 11:08 am
AGAIN it would not even load up this weekend. This semester must contain the worst track record for blackboard.
April 25th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
This system seems to be running at two speeds - slow and stop. Instead of a high speed, broadband connection, this greatly resembles a dialup connection. What a joke!
April 28th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Why is blackboard so slow this weekend? I have 4 more quizzes and 3 Finals to take online that are all timed! The sluggish response is killing the time I’m allotted for the exams!
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Last nite I tried getting on for hours to check my grades, everything else opened (SLOWLY) but the grades never did. I finally gave up and went to bed. In the morning it ran faster, but still not fast enough. Boooooo…….
May 16th, 2007 at 9:05 am
I have seen no change in responsiveness of Blackboard over the last month. The update in May created and even longer process for finding courses I wish to use as there is no longer a way to change which courses are displayed. Checking a list of 50 or so courses for the one that I am currently teaching just adds to the 45-120 seconds it takes to open a gradebook, post quizzes, add items or submit anything. I have had my computer checked and there does not seem to be a problem with the equipment in my campus office.