Instructional Computing has been managing recent problems that keep causing the Blackboard ‘electronic campus’ website to crash. Blackboard serves as a tool for all students and faculty to obtain assignments, view grades, and communicate information from their classrooms outside their classrooms.

On the hardware end, Blackboard is managed by a web server, two application servers and a database.

According to an anonymous Instructional Computing technician, there are several reasons that Blackboard usually collapses. The most common reason is that one of the application servers is unable to cope with the demand for access to the site. The current way to deal with this problem is by manually restarting the server at the very moment that it fails. Since this is the most common problem, there is always a technician that is immediately alerted when the site is down.

Another issue, which was noted by the same anonymous Instructional Computing technician, is a ‘switch between the disks,’ or a disruption between firewalls and servers, that affected other servers like Sparky in addition to Blackboard.

‘It seems blackboard goes down when we need it the most,’ Srinivas Sunkara, a junior, said. Such a complaint is natural when Blackboard goes down during midterms week. This semester, many course exams were scheduled for the first week of October, causing an overload of students to sign onto the blackboard site.

‘It’s very hard to obey deadlines when you can’t find out what homework is due the next day,’ Kate Furman, a junior, said.

Recently, the Instructional Computing technicians have taken steps to provide a lasting solution to Blackboard’s crashing problems. They have incorporated duplicated application servers to prevent the servers from reaching a bandwidth threshold. If one server does reach that threshold, another server will compensate for the extra load of users.