Surge in FAS Network Traffic Leads to Outages, Slowdowns

Slow connections and unscheduled outages have plagued the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) computer network since the opening week of school, administrators said yesterday.

An unprecedented surge in usage this fall necessitated an unplanned upgrade of network resources, according to Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS) Director Franklin M. Steen.

“We do not schedule upgrades for [the fall and] we originally felt the upgrade could be done later on,” Steen wrote in an e-mail. “We had to pull it forward due to the unexpectedly large increase in traffic.”

That upgrade, attempted Monday, was unsuccessful and actually resulted in further outages.

But plans are in place to reattempt it later this week, said Coordinator of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98.

“It’s been a major priority to get the database up and running—it’s been slowing down a lot of things,” Davis said. “We’ve found out how critical it is to the infrastructure.”

One reason for the increase in network traffic, Steen explained, is a rise in the number of server-taxing dynamic webpages.

“The pages are built on-the-fly from data stored on the database server,” Steen wrote. “The number of those sites and the traffic on them far exceeded our expectations.”

The server database acts a repository for information displayed on multiple FAS sites, such as course specifics and webmail, meaning its failure can result in the interruption of numerous sites. In addition, the unified nature of the server means that even unaffected sites can be slowed down by a database outage, Davis said.

Since the beginning of the term, several small outages have occurred, and two have knocked out course websites or e-mail for at least two hours, according to the HASCS website.

Following the attempted upgrade Monday, the my.harvard portal and course websites were affected.

On September 14, these sites were also disabled, along with Unix based e-mail services, including Pine, webmail and PC-based clients such as Outlook and Eudora.

—Staff writer Katharine A. Kaplan can be reached at kkaplan@fas.harvard.edu.