Re: [IUG] Experience with Hosted Millennium?

[Curtis Osmun <cosmun at artic dot edu>]

We were a turnkey site that moved to hosting this past fall. Unfortunately,
our transition hasn't been as smooth for our institution as others have
reported for theirs. However, Innovative has been working diligently with
us to address our issues.

Aside from a few brief denial-of-service attack outages others have
reported occurring two months back, our issues have been limited to two
areas: timeouts and latency.

Timeouts would occur only in our public catalog and appeared to only be
experienced from workstations located on campus. The symptoms were that a
browser would either start a connection and completely timeout with an
error message, or would begin downloading the mainmenu page and be
unsuccessful in completely downloading it. This problem could often be
worked around by canceling the loading of the page and reloading it, but
often our patrons didn't realize this. I'm happy to report this problem
appears to have been resolved this past week, although we're still
monitoring the situation. For reasons unknown, our hosted server was
rejecting some of the packets originating from our institution. We noticed
that the longer our server was up-and-running, the more packets were
rejected.

Our latency issue appears to manifest within the Millennium client.
Although all library divisions have noticed it, it appears to significantly
impact our Technical Services division. Essentially, as long as the client
only has one window open, no latency is noticed and response from the
server is almost instantaneous. When the client opens a second window, as
when opening a single record from a list of records, we experience a delay
of anywhere between 3 to 6 seconds to retrieve information. (Previous to
hosting, additional windows worked for us almost instantaneously.) Some of
our staff report that their macros have broken because the system can no
longer keep up with their actions. (This also would seem to indicate an
inadequate buffer within the client.)

The latency issue appears to be more pronounced for us when searching OCLC
and Library of Congress remotely via z39.50. Although z39.50 has never been
a particularly robust protocol, Technical Services has reported they could
take a coffee break during some of their searches. I suspect the problem
has to do with the z39.50 client being housed on the Millennium server
instead of being contained within the Millennium client itself. Before
hosting, our Chicago Millennium client would talk to our Chicago Millennium
server which would then talk to a z39.50 server located in D.C. for a
Library of Congress request. Once LC responded, information would be fed
back in reverse. After hosting, our Chicago Millennium client talks to our
California Millennium server which then talks to z39.50 in D.C. before a
response is sent back in reverse.  This is a much longer distance for
information to travel than before and probably accounts for the delays our
staff are noticing. We are still working out this issue.

--Curtis

-- 
-------------------------------------------
Curtis Osmun, Systems Librarian
Ryerson and Burnham Libraries
The Art Institute of Chicago

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 12:55 PM, <innopac-request at innovativeusers dot org>wrote:

>
>
> Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 11:34:52 -0500
> From: "Miller, David" <dmiller at post03 dot curry dot edu>
> Subject: [IUG] Experience with Hosted Millennium?
> To: "innopac at innovativeusers dot org" <innopac at innovativeusers dot org>
>
> Hello, everyone -
>
> We're discussing a possible migration from Stand-alone to Hosted
> Millennium. We're a turnkey site. If you've moved in that direction and
> would care to share your experience, please reply. We're particularly
> interested in service availability and reliability issues, but any other
> experience you have to share would be valuable.
>
> Thanks very much,
>
> David M.
> Levin Library, Curry College
> Milton, Mass.
>
> --
-------------------------------------------
Curtis Osmun, Systems Librarian
Ryerson and Burnham Libraries
The Art Institute of Chicago
111 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL  60603
phone: 312-857-7609

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