Students across campus experienced frustrating delays yesterday when trying to reserve their spots on Tufts WebCenter for the annual Fares Lecture, featuring Hillary Clinton on Nov. 10.
The slow connection resulted from the massive influx of students accessing the Web site, many of whom received "Connection Timed Out" notices or were unable to reach the ticket request page.
The 2,600 tickets for the event were made available to the student body as of noon yesterday.
This problem "is typical of what's happened in the past," according to Andrew Sonnenschein, associate director of Internal Technology for Student Services. "The equipment we have just isn't currently sufficient to handle this sort of volume."
An e-mail from Dean of Students Bruce Reitman, sent yesterday afternoon, explained the situation and stated that "as many as 50 requests-per-second [for a ticket] have been received."
Students were less than pleased with the delays.
"It was just so frustrating," junior Edith Elliott said. "I tried logging into WebCenter all day to get a ticket and I still haven't been able to. They've got to develop a better system that doesn't raise my blood pressure."
Sonnenschein said the Web site experienced 25 times as much activity as a normal day this semester. Accessing the ticket request page will become easier as the volume of students accessing WebCenter decreases, he said.
"We'll certainly assess with the Dean of Students office what our [technological] needs will be on an ongoing basis," Sonnenschein said.
"What's happened today is not optimal, and we want to address that and hopefully future events will be much easier on us and on the students."
