This afternoon University IT Services (UITS) observed brief intermittent failures on the campus Web servers. Because the University has redundant Web servers for the main SHU site (www.shu.edu) the Web site remained accessible during this time. Some users may have experienced brief incidents where a page did not load correctly but would load when re-tried; this happens when one of the servers “hangs” and the request is redirected to the backup server. “Rolling restarts” of the servers have helped the problem (each server is restarted in turn while the others take up the load). UITS coninues to monitor the performance of the SHU Web site. An upgrade to the Web site server infrastructure was postponed this summer awaiting a software update from the vendor, but will be scheduled in the next few weeks.
Stephen G. Landry, CIO