More than 37,000 course results released to students with no outages

On Thursday 9th February it was reported that 37,176 course results were published for undergraduate and postgraduate students, with no outages reported.

 This is the highest number of course results ever published in a single day for the University and a 17% increase compared to the number of results released in June 2022. 

We found the publishing process really smooth this year (from a system perspective).

Edinburgh College of Art

The previous record was 31,730 results published to students in June 2022, at which point an outage was reported. The outage seriously impacted the ability of staff to meet the deadline for publishing results, and students were unable to view their results on MyEd.  

Busiest hour

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This graph below shows the peak course results published by hour on 9th February with a publishing peak at 14,000+ in one hour. 

A high number of user logins and page views (+37.5% page view increase from the previous peak period) also kept the database server busy, but load times remained at a steady average of 4.26s page load time (down from 5.23s) which was 18.5% faster compared to the previous year.  

Team Leader, Defeng Ma, attributes this year's improvement to recent work carried out, thanks to the joint effort from the SSP team, Student Systems Operation, IS Applications Development Technology, and  Production Management teams. Collaboratively, these teams carried out work to:

• Increase the memory on the database server  
• Move the database servers to a new virtual management infrastructure (by IT Infrastructure)
• Enhance the database performance by database turning and introducing more indexes 
• Improve the Assessment and Progression Tool (APT) EUCLID processes along with the student self-services process 

Page load speed

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A high number of user logins and page views (+37.5% page view increase from the previous peak period) also kept the database server busy, but load times remained at a steady average of 4.26s page load time (down from 5.23s) which was 18.5% faster compared to the previous year.  

The Student Systems Operations team explained that in the past "we have seen various outages and reports of poor performance" but the outcome in February was markedly different - "this year we passed the deadline with no reports of unavailability or other issues, despite a record number of marks published on the UG course publication day, including a record number within an hour."

Thanks to the collaborative support and recent work done by Student Systems, SSP, IS Applications teams to provide an enhanced experience to staff and students. The exam board periods are incredibly busy and demanding for Schools, so to have confidence in the ability of EUCLID to cope at those peak times really does make a difference.

Lizzie Beattie

Schools across the University reported their positive experience on results day, praising the hard work of the teams involved with the delivery.

The main feedback from the team was the noticeable improvement in speed across all aspects of Boards of Examiners preparation and mark ratification and publication. It definitely made the process less stressful for all concerned.

Geosciences