For nearly two years, Elmhurst Park District residents have completed their online seasonal registrations seamlessly. But on Saturday, February 24 during spring registration, a glitch with the software caused significant slowdowns as hundreds of households attempted to register simultaneously.
“Seven consecutive registrations had been processed without incident, including the winter registration back in early December,” said Executive Director Jim Rogers, “But residents on February 24 encountered a frustrating situation when registrations were processing at an unacceptable rate of speed.”
Following spring registration, District staff and the Board’s ad hoc IT committee began working closely with the software provider, RecTrac from Vermont Systems, Inc. (VSI), to understand the issues that caused slow processing times. Two items were identified with the software coding, and a number of corrective actions have been taken since that time.
This week VSI will begin load testing on the District’s database to ensure the system can handle the high volume of traffic typical of a resident registration day.
“We expect the load testing to identify a consistent level of performance for the registration system, including error identification, user response time and system performance in advance of summer registration,” said Director of Information Technology Allison Wiggins. “The goal is to ensure the community is not impacted by updates, patches or fixes applied between scheduled open registrations.”
District staff has also worked with VSI to complete a number of other tests and updates, all of which have been successful.
“The long-term solution remains to be seen at this point, but right now our focus is making sure the software will work as intended for summer registration,” said Rogers, “Hundreds of parents will be online Saturday, May 5 trying to register for thousands of programs, and our goal is to provide a positive experience.”
Summer registration for residents will begin at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, May 5. The summer brochure will be delivered early next week but people can browse the online version here.
