Mosaic off to rough start

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After three years of an intensive set-up process, the new registration system Mosaic replaced MUGSI and SOLAR on March 23. The system had many initial problems, crashing within an hour of its launch. Since then the team behind Mosaic has been working to fix the kinks in the system.

“[We] spent a lot of time doing load and performance testing [before the launch], trying to simulate a load on the system and figure out where the bottlenecks would be,” said Kevin de Kock, Technology Lead on Mosaic. “But you can only simulate so much in a lab environment. [On Monday] we saw more people trying to get onto the system than we have ever seen before.”

Looking forward, the central IT team will continue to conduct performance testing on Mosaic.

“Every change [we] make, [we] have to make sure it doesn’t disturb the system again – which is what we have been doing and seeing incremental improvements,” said de Kock.

“The important thing for people to understand that there is no one small bug that will be fixed and make it work better… Performance standing is an ongoing thing. We are very aware of the frustration that people feel and the things they struggle with. We want to know what those issues are because we want to be able to respond.”

Students will also see a change in the enrollment process come June. As with SOLAR, class enrollment will open to students based on year or level. However, each level will be randomly subdivided into small groups, with each group given a different window of time to enroll during the day. This staggered enrollment will limit the number of students trying to log on at once, decreasing stress and preventing the system from crashing. Enrollment will open during the day, instead of at midnight as with SOLAR.

Mosaic also has a greater capacity for the number of students it can handle in comparison to SOLAR. Mosaic is based on virtualized servers, meaning that extra servers can be added during times when load is expected to increase.

Since the launch of Mosaic, students have also experienced problems with course registration in classes that required prerequisites taken in high school. This problem has since been fixed, and students have been able to enroll in summer courses successfully.

“It is the nature of this project that we will continue to find scenarios and we will continue to deal with them as they come,” said Melissa Pool, University Registrar.

“It was a conscious decision to launch this term to prepare us for [enrollment in June]. We wanted to go through this so that we could get some experience, understand what the pressure points would be so that we can be better prepared for the next time,” recounted John Kearney, Chief Information Officer.

PR Manager Sheldon Smart noted that issues are to be expected at the start. “A large project like this, there is always some transition friction, and we are working to address that as quickly as possible.”

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