This afternoon about 2:30 PM the University’s main Web site (www.shu.edu) experienced intermittent problems. One of the two servers became very slow due to a corrupted file. The University’s Web site employs two servers which are load balanced, so that in the event one server fails the other will pick up the load. In this case, however, because one of the servers was slow but not off line, the load balancer did not automatically detect the problem and continued to direct about half of the page requests to the slow server. The situation was corrected manually after about twenty minutes. During this period, some users experienced slow page refreshes. Attempting to “refresh” the page a few times would usually correct the problem, since half the page requests were going to the good server. All system are now fully restored.
Stephen G. Landry, Ph.D., CIO