We are aware that over the past few weeks the performance of the Ovid / NISS
BIOMED Service has sometimes appeared slow and we have taken various steps
to improve the service.
The reason for this recent degradation in performance has been the huge
demand for the service with a sudden increase in users at the beginning of
the academic term combined with the recent series of training sessions that
often happen at this time of year. We believe that Biomed is now the most
widely used National service in UK HE after ISI. The service is most
heavily used between
the hours of 10am and 4pm, so use outside of these hours will offer users
improved
performance.
The important recent steps taken have been a further investment in server
hardware to improve the access speed and increase the concurrent user
capacity, and a reduction in the timeout period which has been set to 5
minutes. These changes have significantly improved the performance.
Additionally there are further enhancements being tested which will give the
service a further increase in performance.
There are also a number of steps that users can take to help improve the
situation - such as actively logging off and mailing / saving long documents
to themselves to read, as opposed to reading them Online.
NISS continuously monitors the performance throughout working hours and will
continue to make changes where they improve the performance. Note that NISS
may vary the timeout period without notice in order to maximise performance.
Ovid and NISS continue to work together to further increase the capacity of
the system.
Alex Lankester, Ovid
Ed Zedlewski, NISS
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