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Question: high volume testing with 4.0?

Question:high volume testing with 4.0?

ef 4
testing array mapleta graph
June 02 2009
0
Is anyone testing in high volume environments with MapleTA. After about a year of continual problems with 3.0 (pretty awful piece of software) and now more with 4.0, I have a hard time believing folks are using the software in high stakes, high volume environments such as placement testing and I'm looking for feedback. Some background: We run about 300 per day through during June for a total of 5000. We host here on a dual 3.0ghz xeon box with 8gb ram and a 100gb scsi raid5 array. A somewhat old but beefy box that has hosted high demand web apps in its past before being incarnated as a mapleta server. Tomcat 6.x and postgres 8.2 (please don't suggest 8.3; as I said, we have another app with 5 million row tables in 8.2 that is lightning quick). Some specific questions: Anyone doing placement testing with ~5000 students per year? I can't seat more than 150 simultaneously with any reliability. If I try to add a user during testing, it hoses the postgres service to the point of swapping or spawning the dreaded java.lang.* errors across my labs. Tech support has suggested upgrading to 4.0 so we did. No joy. We at least feel that we can seat the folks and test them. We just have to tippy toe around until they're done. With 3.0 I couldn't get more than 80 testing at a time. Anyone have a better version of the MAA test banks? The one we got, admittedly a year ago, is riddle with errors and "insert graphics here" notes that we've had to fix. Any other thoughts are welcome. I feel like I'm posting this in a group meeting hoping for commiseration after sending yet another group of incoming freshmen out freaked out by failed testing software.
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