NEWS RELEASE

April 5, 2007

Prospector Performance Issues

Prospector continues to be a very popular site among the public and librarians alike. Because Prospector is heavily used, there may be brief periods of time in which you are unable to access the site. You may notice this particularly during peak hours from about 1-3pm Monday-Thursday during the spring and fall semesters when students are doing lots of research. Recently, we have added more user licenses to Prospector to help accommodate the heavy traffic. This means fewer turnaways when trying to access the site. However, from time to time all licenses are being used. If you try to access Prospector, but get a message that too many users are logged in, wait a few minutes, refresh your browser and try again. As searches are completed, seats become available once again and you can get into the site. It is hard to predict when this is happening so it's best to keep trying tom get into the site.

You may have also noticed some slowness in getting search results back from Prospector after doing a keyword search. The system isn't down, but is slower because of the heavy system traffic.  We believe this is causing Prospector to take longer to retrieve information from the database. We are monitoring these performance issues and hope to make improvements as necessary.

If you have questions, please contact us at help@coalliance.org

Rose Nelson
Systems Librarian
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries

Prospector: http://prospector.coalliance.org

Alliance Web Services:http://www.coalliance.org