On the afternoon of Monday, April 11^th, we experienced a slow down affecting the student finance processing in Production SIS.  ITS technical staff identified at least one query and a number of batch jobs - several group postings, a batch refund, a term activation, and an enrollment cancellation – that were running during this slow period.  Because of the way the SIS application locks and unlocks student finance tables in order to assign transaction numbers and counters, the locking caused by the batch jobs had a negative effect on students being able to make payments and view their accounts over the web.  Students experienced their SIS sessions “timing out” which meant that they were no longer connecting to the database but the database still maintained their request in a queued state.  The database then had to continue processing the batch requests and in-between specific batch tasks the database also had to review each queued student session to determine if it was still active or inactive and take the appropriate step.  ITS staff did stop the query job and also identified and stopped a number of inactive sessions however it took several hours before the “traffic jam” could be cleared.

In the past we have talked about the importance of the Good Neighbor policy and that colleges need to refrain from running batch jobs during business hours.  Most folks have thought of the Good Neighbor policy in terms of being respectful of the other 22 colleges.  However, it is really more accurate to think of the Good Neighbor policy as the Good Student Policy.  When you run a batch job during the day, you have the potential of running a job that will have keep students from successfully registering and paying for classes.

On March 23, 2005, Client Services sent out a note entitled “Process Scheduler Servers: PSUNXPM, PSUNX, & PSNT” announcing the creation of a second UNIX batch server that would handle specific batch jobs that should be run during non-business hours.  At the time of the initial announcement we stated that we would run this server for a period of time during normal business hours in order to verify that it was correctly scheduling and processing the batch jobs.  We are now in the process of finishing the configuration of the PM Unix batch server so that all jobs assigned to it are run during non-business hours.  You will shortly receive another announcement that will provide the following information:

1.  Effective date for when the PM Unix batch server will be activated for non-business hours processing
2.  Daily schedule for when the PM Unix batch server will run
3.  Batch jobs that are assigned to the PM Unix batch server

Thank you,