Solutions in store for mail.sas

Solutions are on the way. But for College of Arts and Sciences students waiting for their electronic mail system to resume regular service, those solutions can't come soon enough. Shumon Huque, systems programmer and administrator for SAS Computing, insists that both short-and long-term plans are going into affect to correct the problems which came to the forefront this week when the system was especially overloaded. Significant alterations are required to increase response time and redistribute the mail.sas system's load, Huque explained. "SAS has about 5,000 users on the system," said Dan Updegrove, executive director of Data Communications and Computing Services. "That's a huge number to deal with." The "menu" system, a feature which over half of the mail.sas users utilize, "imposes a large overhead on the system because each user is running an additional program," according to Huque. In addition, the mail.sas computer exists on an extremely busy portion of the network. The "subnet," Huque said, is also home to the campus news server, as well as other very active computer systems. Network access is therefore subject to a great deal of internal competition. Furthermore, he explained, the College's single machine operation and automatic account generator add considerable load to the system. This strain accounts for mail.sas's slower operation than Eniac, the system of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "[The two] are quite similar in that they're both UNIX workstations," Updegrove said. "But there are many more users on SAS, reflecting on the fact that SAS is much larger." To compensate for these problems, the SAS Computing system will eventually be upgraded to a faster server -- the SPARC server 1000, with four processors as opposed to the current single system. "There will be a significant boost in performance," Huque said. Updegrove agreed that the additions will dramatically increase the speed of the system. "Imagine running a post office with one person sorting the mail," Updegrove said. "And then you add another." However, these changes will not be made until this summer because the reconfiguration will take approximately a week. During that time, the central machine will have to be shut down. "In the meantime," Huque said, "we are making a number of changes to improve performance." "Very soon now" a second machine will be added to deliver and receive mail.sas electronic mail. Mail.sas will also be moved to a less used "subnet" to further reduce the network load. The combinations of these corrections, according to Huque, should dramatically improve the present mail.sas system. Until the short-term changes are made, College students continue to experience slow response times and overload problems.