Higher Institutions: Handle Peak Loads
For many years, managing peak loads has been a top concern for many performance engineers in various industries, including the education sector. A sudden spike in website traffic brings risks for countless brands, including slow loading times, website crashes, and prolonged downtime. This is why higher education institutions need to ensure that their systems are prepared for high user volume, including their ERP platforms like the Ellucian Banner.
Ellucian Banner has been the top ERP system choice for countless universities and colleges, helping them streamline various tasks for their students. This is particularly helpful during the school registration period, allowing students to efficiently finish the process right in the comfort of their homes. WebLOAD is currently the only tool that has a direct integration with Ellucian Banner 9 and is recommended by Ellucian itself.
However, despite the benefits Ellucian Banner provides during enrollment, handling peak loads on the platform can still be challenging. A sudden influx of students rushing to sign up for classes on the platform can lead to all kinds of trouble. This risks the possibility of students missing out on their preferred schedules or even delaying their overall registration process.
The Challenges of Managing Peak Loads in Banner
It is no secret that the registration process is one of the most crucial periods of a higher education institution’s academic year. Universities and colleges must ensure that their websites are prepared to handle thousands of simultaneous student registrations daily during this time. This is especially since high user activity can lead to performance bottlenecks that can degrade student experience during enrollment, including slower response time and increased latency.
Another potential challenge that developers and performance engineers might face with Ellucian Banner is how to scale their system to handle the required load. It is crucial that their resources can be easily expanded when needed, especially during peak user activity. This includes their server capacity, network bandwidth, and database capabilities.
Addressing these concerns ensures system resilience under heavy load during the registration period. Higher education institutions can ensure that their registration portals are available and operational, especially when the demand is at its highest. It will allow them to mitigate any failure risks and enable them to handle traffic spikes effectively. This can guarantee that the system meets student expectations, retaining their trust and upholding their reputation.
Load Testing for Peak Load Management
There are several strategies that universities and colleges can implement to ensure that their systems are ready for high-user activity. But one of the most effective processes that countless institutions utilize nowadays is load testing. This allows them to subject their websites and applications to simulated situations and see if it is well-equipped to handle peak loads.
Load testing involves multiple steps that ensure the system can handle increased user demand. This includes:
- Defining Testing Objectives – Here, stakeholders can set their expectations about how the pages should respond under specific loads. Every performance metric should be defined, and the success criteria should be finalized. This can give the performance engineer an idea about the aspects that need to be tested, including response time, scalability, and stability.
- Preparing the Testing Environment – The performance engineer must prepare the test environment that resembles the production environment. This includes the hardware, software, network configuration, and database setup. This can help correctly estimate the system’s capacity and performance under certain conditions during testing.
- Application Scripting – The team should develop and record load-testing scripts that simulate realistic situations based on previous user trends. This helps generate load patterns and precisely assess the system’s performance under varying user volumes.
- Scaling the Script – Although it is typically considered a separate part of the load-testing process, script scaling is crucial for those who want to test the limits of their websites or applications. Here, the performance engineer can modify the parameters in the script and increase the number of concurrent users or change data inputs to see if their portals can handle bigger traffic.
How to Handle Performance Issues Discovered During Testing
If you identify performance issues in your Ellucian Banners environment after load testing, there are some other things you can do to improve the system’s capacity. This can help improve the website’s capability to handle peak loads and ensure that it runs smoothly during enrollment.
- More Hardware – One of the most straightforward solutions to performance bottlenecks is to add more hardware into the mix. This can increase the system’s processing power and capacity, allowing the website to efficiently handle many simultaneous requests from numerous students.
- Configuration Tuning – Alternatively, universities and colleges can also choose to optimize the settings and parameters of different system components. This allows the IT team to allocate the resources, including CPU and memory, more efficiently to handle high user volume.
- Database Tuning – Performance engineers can also choose to tune their database to improve their platform’s reliability and scalability. They can adjust various aspects of the database, including query execution plans, indexing strategies, and configuration parameters, to optimize resource utilization.
- Modifying Course Prerequisites – Institutions can also modify course prerequisites to influence student selection patterns and the load on the backend servers. Doing so can help the university or college make the overall registration process smoother for their students, reducing the possibility of a sudden spike in user activity during enrollment.
- Ellucian Support – Higher education institutions can also rely on Ellucian’s state-of-the-art support system if they identify bottlenecks in their Ellucian Banner environments. The Ellucian Customer Center offers personalized support to their client’s unique needs.
How Can WebLOAD Help
With load testing becoming more crucial for universities and colleges nowadays, it is also vital to have a reliable load testing tool like WebLOAD. Using WebLOAD for performance testing has several advantages, including:
- Supports Complex Applications with Ease – WebLOAD can handle complex systems through asynchronous communication, web services, WebSocket APIs, and more.
- Proven Experience with Higher Education Customers – WebLOAD has helped numerous universities and colleges worldwide identify bottlenecks in their systems, enabling them to fix the problems before it’s too late.
- Exceptional Customer Support – Radview has a dedicated technical support team that helps our clients navigate the complexities of load testing, saving their time and ensuring the success of their program.
Conclusion
As more and more students register for higher education in the coming years, universities and colleges must know how to handle peak load on their websites properly. They can identify potential bottlenecks in their systems through load testing and act upon them immediately. Higher education institutions will surely get ahead of the surge and master peak load with WebLOAD and Ellucian Banner.
For more information, learn about WebLOAD’s Higher Education solution or Schedule a Demo to hear more about the Ellucian Banner 9 Integration.
