Educational success in hours per year on a website

Posted on by primaryt

One way to look at the success of an educational site is to look at the amount of time in a year spent by users on that site. Below is exactly that.

Total hours since Nov 2,2008:

School Email = 7,806 hours
School Safe Search = 1,894 hours
Primary Games Arena = 1,154 hours
Primary Technology = 771 hours
Primary Blogger = 770 hours
Primary School Teaching (Opened May 2009) = 408 hours
School Closures (Opened Sep 2009) = 84 hours
McLear(My Blog) = 63.7 hours

Thanks to google analytics we can get this information.

I have being able to use this information to explain the real time importance of the sites to their teams. For example if I say to a coder the website has 400 visits a day it doesn’t sound as impressive as if I say..

“The website gives 10 hours of educational help every single day…”

Primary School Teaching has served 2+ hours worth of resources every day, for a website purely built by a community of educators I think our hats go off to teachers for being part of a sharing, web2 community.
Of course if your website is purely designed then a user will struggle to get to the resource they need, we know that isn’t the case here – our users tend to come, find one thing then continue to browse around the site looking for useful resources. Are teachers and learners naturally inquisitive?

Why is my shibboleth IDP so slow to accept the first connection?

Posted on by primaryt

When I create my first connection to my shibboleth IDP it takes 30 / 40 seconds for tomcat to serve the login page.

At first I expected that my tomcat memory allocation / heap space value wasn’t being applied but my ps aux | grep java showed:
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/opt/tomcat/conf/logging.properties -Xmx512m -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/opt/tomcat/common/endorsed -classpath :/opt/tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/opt/tomcat/bin/commons-logging-api.jar -Dcatalina.base=/opt/tomcat -Dcatalina.home=/opt/tomcat -Djava.io.tmpdir=/opt/tomcat/temp org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start
I could see above it wasn’t using enough memory so I edited /usr/share/tomcat5.5/bin/catalina.sh and under JAVA_OPTS I added: -Xms256m -Xmx1024m -server -XX:+AggressiveOpts -XX:MaxPermSize=512m
It now reads:
JAVA_OPTS=”$JAVA_OPTS “-Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager” “-Djava.util.logging.config.file=”$CATALINA_BASE/conf/logging.properties -Xms256m -Xmx2048m -server -XX:+AggressiveOpts -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m”
I used the ./shutdown.sh script provided with tomcat to shutdown tomcat and then the ./startup.sh script to restart. Tested and performance was massively improved after a 5 minute start up wait.
Use tailf /var/log/shibboleth/idp-process.log to watch the log file to check for startup completion.