With the new WebAssign feature that allows students to submit each question in an assignment separately, our usage rate has increased markedly. Students are very enthusiastic about this new WebAssign capability. Unfortunately, the increased traffic has resulted in an overall slow response time during the evenings.

To improve performance, we have made many small changes in the code and tuned our server configurations. We have now installed 5 new fast servers, more than doubling our capability. Our performance goal, while improved, is still not at an acceptable level.

The next step affects the way a student assignment is processed when individual questions are submitted for grading. The proposed change involves caching the display of questions on an assignment so that each question on the assignment does not get regenerated from scratch each time another question is submitted or saved. This procedure should greatly improve the speed for this most common activity in WebAssign. Virtually all of our students will not experience any difference. If you use textbooks questions or standard questions that can be used in any order, your assignments will not be affected.

However, if you have created assignments that pass a variable between questions, something that only very advanced users have done, you should change these assignments to "Require submission of the whole assignment." We have additional advice for those who use this advanced coding. Please contact us (support@webassign.net) and we will give you the details.

We will be releasing this caching code this weekend.

Your patience and suggestions are appreciated. WebAssign must be back to normal speed before we are satisfied.