Attention eClass Users,

As classes come to a close and our focus shifts to final assessments, we wanted to provide you an update on how eClass has performed through the transition to online delivery.

eClass has had roughly 1.3 million user sessions with 11 million page views and an average of 34,000 active daily users. Our busiest day was March 17th, where the total number of users who accessed eClass was 40,648. For comparison, this is still less than the total number of users who accessed eClass on the first day of Fall term 2019, when 48,144 users visited the site.

The overall usage profile is showing fewer traffic spikes but a higher average load with increases to both the average session length and the number of page visits per session. Through all of this, our monitoring has shown consistent and responsive performance on the system. 

In preparation for the final exam period when we expect there to be a surge in synchronous quiz attempts, we have taken the following steps to ensure the performance continues to meet expectations:

• We have doubled the baseline number of server nodes in our environment.
• We have doubled both the application and database memory size.
• We have been constantly monitoring and tuning site performance based on traffic.
• We are prepared to rapidly deploy changes to the environment if required.

To that end, we are confident that instructors and students will be able to rely on eClass through the exam period - final assessments are stressful enough without needing to worry about technical failures.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Regards,
IST eClass Support