Installation manual

Performance and Scalability Performance Issues and Improvements

Release Notes for Release 9.1 Service Pack 3 (9.1.30151.0) Page 10

Performance and Scalability

Blackboard continuously invests in making Blackboard Learn more responsive and able to handle

greater volumes of user traffic. This section describes the performance and scalability issues in

this release of Blackboard Learn.

Performance issues occur when application responsiveness for a system not under load fails to

meet user expectations. Scalability issues occur when application responsiveness or stability of a

page request for a system under load fails to meet user expectations.

Issues are identified by clients through our traditional support channels and as a result of the

performance and scalability exercises performed as part of all Service Pack releases.

Performance Issues and Improvements

Release 9.1 Service Pack 3 outperforms previously released service packs from both a

responsiveness and scalability perspective across all supported platform configurations. No

degradation was reported during any performance tests when comparing against any previous

service pack using regression performance settings. Performance improvements have been

confirmed on both Windows and Unix configurations.

Course Content

Full table scans occurred when switching between view modes for Content within a course;

specifically when toggling from Icon and Text view to either the Show Icons Only or the Show

Text Only views.

This was corrected in SP3 so it no longer runs full table scans against the COURSE_CONTENTS

table.

Content System

When deleting a large number of items listed in the orphaned content report, a Request-URI Too

Large error was sometimes encountered. This issue was fixed and the error no longer occurs.

Notifications

During various batch operations, the performance of the application could degrade due to the

large volume of notifications. The query for sending the notifications has been modified to correct

this issue.

General System Performance

During performance testing, it was noticed that SQL Server database connection acquisition from

the connection pool was slower than it needed to be. This was because DBCC USEROPTIONS

was run each time a connection was acquired. This was corrected so that the DBCC calls were

no longer made, resulting in a faster new connection from the connection pool.