TSO began an internal discussion early this semester to look into reports the help desk received regarding latency when connecting to the CoC website. This issue also became a topic among FCC members in late August to be marked as a high priority on the TSO?s project list. TSO then reviewed the web architecture and the history behind the build out to prepare for a September 5th meeting with Dean Foley, Stefany Wilson and the previous CoC web developer.
TSO presented the attached PDF webinfrastructure as a handout during this meeting. The first diagram indicates where the deficiencies in design and the lack of ongoing maintenance had contributed to the latency. The second page of the handout includes recommendations to alleviate some of the latency issues. TSO was asked by Dean Foley if these issues could be addressed and for a timeframe for implementation. The project was made the primary objective for TSO, however the college has been unable to find an acceptable candidate to fill the vacant web developer position since mid-October of last year. In lieu of a web developer, TSO assigned two UNIX administrators from the operations group the task of developing, testing and assessing a timeframe for implementation in two weeks and report their findings.
On September 18th it was agreed that the following implementation would be performed based on TSOs? recommendations from the previous meeting?s handout. Milestones for service rollouts were then set.
TSO built the new production environment for www.cc, support.cc and intranet.cc by creating new OS and application loads, making the system configuration changes and upgrading Plone, Zope, Python and their respective interdependent libraries. This addressed two main issues. The versions of some software had been recorded by OIT Information Security as having a medium level security risk posture for the CoC, and the previous web services architecture was never performance tuned.
TSO then migrated the intranet.cc and support.cc sites to the new production environment on September 26th. They also announced www-test.cc for public testing purposes. The sites did perform significantly faster and the security issues had been addressed. TSO also added an additional feature to have the Plone instances authenticate off of the CC domain to simplify login for the user and to reduce local account creation overhead for TSO.
During the week after these first migrations, TSO continued to watch the performance of the sites and began to performance test the development site (www-test.cc) and older production site for the CoC (www.cc). Independent scans were performed on the content of www.cc to determine if the perceived latency was still related to the new architecture or newer applications. It was determined that the size of the page content is causing some latency. In addition, the drop down menu bar script running in Plone causes certain browsers navigation feature (e.g. Internet Explorer) to hang until the script has timed out.
TSO met with Stefany Wilson on October 7th to explain the issues and that the ongoing latency with some pages cannot be addressed until the web content is improved upon. Some of these scans have been included for your reference: www-test-external-benchmark, oldwww-cc-benchmark-external, and WebSiteOptimization .
TSO migrated www-test.cc to www.cc and replaced the previous site on October 10th.
Please note that this 25 day project was intended to update a build out of the current CoC web services. These web services went through at least three major architectural modifications and a CSM implementation over a five year period without a formal project plan. The previous updates to our existing web infrastructure were segmented and made to integrate with legacy web systems. A holistic consideration of the CoC web architecture and a project plan for new services will be scheduled at a later date.
Please contact TSO if you notice any issues with the new implementation.