Canvas please add more computing horsepower this time of year

[joseph_allen]

So if you are like me, this is the crazy busy time of the year getting our district and Canvas ready to open the school year.  We're loading thousands of courses, hundreds of thousands of student enrollments from our SIS, more than a hundred thousand parent observers, thousands of teachers are copying their courses from last year to this year's shells and we're trying to use the new blue print courses to push out content and set default course settings.  All par for the course and we've done it before.  Here is the trouble....     I'm not sure I've ever seen Canvas slow like it is now.  I know its because we are putting a lot of volume through as are probably most Canvas customers.  We are doing APIs like crazy, including the Blue Print courses, but I think there are limits on how many can go through per hour and I think the collective Canvas user base, not just our district are adding to the performance loss.

Given this level of volume is predictable, can Canvas add some computer processing horsepower to handle the increased load?  I think they call that server or processing elasticity.  Our teachers and staff get a little discouraged when they experience delays that they don't typically see using Canvas through the rest of the year and this is the time of year when we need to impress the most.

Thanks,

Joe

[Renee_Carney]

Hi Joe!

We appreciate your post and we share in the pressures that this time of year can bring. I did some checking with our ops team to make sure I had the right response for you.

First, there have been reports of slowness around processing large blueprint courses. Things aren't actually slowing down around the jobs, they just take time to process. Our ops team has been exploring options to hopefully speed up the processing of blueprint jobs.

Second, SIS imports also take time to process. Our ops team is monitoring jobs continuously and adjusting as they see any clogs. One thing to keep in mind with SIS jobs is that there are variables on the Canvas side of things that could take time to process, but the SIS also brings in another set of variables.

I hope this helps give you a little more insight into how seriously we take productivity, and that we're always looking for ways to speed things up.

[joseph_allen]

Thanks Renee.  i'm speaking to my CSM as well.   Our blue print courses are trying to push out to 5,000 - 10,000 courses.  What we're doing there is setting course navigation, settings, and adding a home page to all of our teachers new course shells.  In the future, we may do this through the new course CSV, but the functionality wasn't available until the latest production push.  There is no issue with SIS importing.   The regular Canvas interface and functionality is running fine save for one thing which is course copying.  Our teachers came back from summer break at the end of last week and one of the things they need to do to get ready for the new school year which starts on Sept 5 is copy last year's Canvas course into this years course shell.  There are about 5,000 teachers who are copying one or more courses all in the space of a few days, so I know we are putting strain on the system.  Typically a copy/import goes through either right away, or with just a few seconds of 'queuing' appearing on the screen.  I'm getting reports that this is taking many minutes to even hours in some cases.  Again, I'm speaking to our CSM who has been very helpful and the point of my post was to see if others had been experiencing the same things.     

[joseph_allen]

Thanks Renee.  i'm speaking to my CSM as well.   Our blue print courses are trying to push out to 5,000 - 10,000 courses.  What we're doing there is setting course navigation, settings, and adding a home page to all of our teachers new course shells.  In the future, we may do this through the new course CSV, but the functionality wasn't available until the latest production push.  There is no issue with SIS importing.   The regular Canvas interface and functionality is running fine save for one thing which is course copying.  Our teachers came back from summer break at the end of last week and one of the things they need to do to get ready for the new school year which starts on Sept 5 is copy last year's Canvas course into this years course shell.  There are about 5,000 teachers who are copying one or more courses all in the space of a few days, so I know we are putting strain on the system.  Typically a copy/import goes through either right away, or with just a few seconds of 'queuing' appearing on the screen.  I'm getting reports that this is taking many minutes to even hours in some cases.  Again, I'm speaking to our CSM who has been very helpful and the point of my post was to see if others had been experiencing the same things.