In an Internet based computing environment, many students will log on to the same server through the Internet at the same time. In such an environment, there could be many performance problems such as input/output device bottleneck, data sharing, server computer performance, network throughput, and Internet data transaction problems. To effectively support online technology-based courses, one of the computer lab administrator’s tasks is to identify performance bottleneck and solve the problem by tuning the performance to make the operations in the computer lab more efficient.
The following are some tasks that can be done in a performance tuning process.
• Collect the performance related information from students and faculty members who are using the online computer lab.
• Based on the collected information, identify the performance problem. There are some performance management tools available to assist the identification process.
• Solve the performance problem by altering options, changing the Internet service plan, adding new equipment, upgrading software and hardware, and modifying the network structure.
• Document the changes and inform the lab users about the changes made during the tuning process.
In the following, we will first investigate some potential performance problems in an online computer lab. Then, we will discuss some performance management tools. Lastly, we will discuss several ways to improve performance.
Performance Problems
One of the complaints from students is the performance of an online computer lab. In general, the performance of an online computer lab is slower than that of a facet to- face computer lab. An incorrectly configured computer lab can make the situation worse. Many factors can cause performance problems. A performance problem may be caused by a poor solution design, underpowered computer hardware and software, limited network bandwidth, improper configurations, or a combination of these factors. To see how these factors affect an online computer lab’s performance, let us take a look at the descriptions of these problems in the following. Solution architecture has a large impact on the performance of a computer lab. It is often difficult to meet everyone’s performance requirements. The issues that need to be considered are:
• Resource sharing: It is important to know how and when a lab resource such as a server or a database is shared by multiple classes. Based on the information collected, the designer can make a design decision.
• Load balance: If a server gets a higher load than what is expected, the performance will decrease significantly.
• Input /Output bottleneck: When the system data, application data, and log data are all stored on one hard disk, it may cause a bottleneck when multiple processes read or write data to or from the disk.
• Memory leak: A poorly designed computer program causes memory leaks that make part of the memory unavailable for other computation.
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