DoIT Help Desk Knowledgebase : Top Hat - Slowness or Delayed Loading for Large Lecture Courses

Disclaimer: This news item was originally posted on 2024-09-13 10:56:45. Its content may no longer be timely or accurate.

What's happening?  

Some students are experiencing delays with questions appearing on their devices, or their responses are not being transmitted back to the faculty screen. As a result, both faculty and students have reported "slowness" issues with Top Hat's functionality. 

Who is affected? 

At present, these issues are not widespread. Reports suggest they are affecting approximately a handful to a couple of dozen students in large courses (with over 200 students). We are still uncertain if smaller classes are experiencing similar challenges, as there are no reports thus far. 

 

Why is this happening?  

We've identified elevated system load usage throughout Top Hat's backend systems, such as databases and system message queues, which are contributing to the delays in loading questions or submitting responses. 

 

Steps taken thus far?

Since these issues came to light, we've taken the following measures to address them: 

• Adjusted service scaling based on the number of question requests (August 29)

• Updated database scaling and added enhanced monitoring (September 4)

• Increased the capacity of backend database instances (September 5)

• Released a new iOS build v8.66.0 that includes changes to increase the speed of questions loading on iOS devices (September 6) 

Unfortunately, these steps haven't fully resolved the issue yet. 

 

To expedite a resolution, we've classified this as a Severity 1 issue and assembled a dedicated Swarm group, involving Product, App Platform, and Mobile teams whose next steps are: 

• Mobile app: - from observations, the above release improves the performance of loading questions; 100% rollout is expected by Sep 16th since iOS updates require a device to download these overnight. A similar update will be coming to Android devices soon.

• Web platform: We are continuing to investigate potential causes and have some leads on what may be causing the issue.

We will continue to keep you updated as we make progress.