Performance Team begins effort to improve PeopleSoft, Web performance
The job of the newly established Performance Team is to improve the performance of the PeopleSoft system and its front-end Web registration system. And it's going to be far from easy. The complexity of the system makes it difficult to isolate possible "suspects" of poor performance and any "fixes" must be made carefully lest they create problems in another panel or process.
"Performance is unacceptable -- by any measure."
Tim Fitzpatrick, Enterprise Production and Technical Support, says PeopleSoft performance is a "culture shock" for U staff used to the sub-second response of the mainframe system. While the client/server technology of the Peoplesoft system isn't designed to match mainframe response (its big benefit is its desktop convenience and flexibility), Fitzpatrick says that "performance is unacceptable -- by any measure. PeopleSoft performance has deteriorated. At worst, panels can take minutes to load. It's not good enough to get the job done."
It's detective work.
"Bottlenecks" are the root cause of slow response time -- some mix of application workload overwhelms some matching infrastructure (e.g., hardware, network, server, CPU) capacity. The team needs to find the overloaded infrastructure component and then trace it back to the application program(s). The solution involves adjustments to the hardware or fixing the offending application program.
The Team has specific goals and will regularly issue a "report card" on their progress:
- Reduce Web response times at peak periods to 10 seconds average
- Reduce PeopleSoft panel response at peak periods to 10 seconds average.
- Schedule all batch jobs to complete overnight.
Vendors, consultants working with us on the problem.
A PeopleSoft "fact-finding" technical team visited campus in mid-December to gather information on specific areas of performance, which they will then analyze. Fitzpatrick says that the Performance Team can find and fix many of the causes of slow response, "but it will take PeopleSoft working with us to have the big impact." The U has contracted with Andersen Consulting, LLD, for a three-week assessment of our technical infrastructure and work processes. The manufacturers of the Sun application servers and Oracle database are also interested in the results of the U's investigation, as many other universities using PeopleSoft are also Sun and Oracle customers.
Some improvements implemented, others on the way
The Grad School admissions office implemented G-WIS (pronounced GEE WHIZ), an application developed by the University of Wisconsin. Information from paper applications is entered into G-WIS, where it is pooled and transferred to PeopleSoft nightly. Grad School staff report entering the data from an application takes about 90 seconds, down from about 15 minutes when data is entered directly into PeopleSoft. The undergraduate and professional admissions offices are also interested in using G-WIS, although the program is designed for graduate schools.
Staff are also working on a fix to the Web Registration System, which, if testing goes well, will go live January 18, enhancing Web response in time for spring semester cancel/adds. In December, the Web Team limited the number for students using the system at one time from about 300 to 180. This had the effect of improving response time for students using the system, which in turn, allowed more students to be served. The result: few system "crashes," more students served, and record numbers of classes added/canceled.
"There's no silver bullet."
Other than the Web fixes described above, Fitzpatrick expects performance to show slow and incremental improvement, as staff shaves a second off response by fixing one thing and two more seconds by fixing another. "Unfortunately, there's no silver bullet," Fitzpatrick said. "Instead it's a day-in-day-out find it and fix it strategy."
The Performance Team is composed of staff from OIT Production and Technical Services (PTS), Web Development, and Student 2000 Project. Project manager and Team Lead is Nick Choban, OIT.
For more information on the Performance Team, E-mail jposeley@umn.edu.
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