Despite a series of technical problems, including overwhelming demand, hardware limitations and software trouble, that resulted in the malfunction of the student e-mail system this fall, Academic Computing Services Director Tony Wood continues to vouch for the system’s dependability.

Throughout fall quarter, system outages prevented students from accessing campus e-mail. According to Wood, there has only been one instance this quarter of a malfunction in Webmail’s main infrastructure. The problem occurred the morning of Oct. 26 and was remedied by afternoon the next day. Wood attributed the problem to three primary causes, particularly the increased use of ACS Webmail, the update of software relating to the Web server and hardware limitations.

“Our usage statistics for comparable weeks this quarter and last fall show a 50 percent increase [in Webmail use],” Wood said. “We [also] installed a new version of the Apache http-server on … Oct. 26. We expected this version to improve ACS Webmail performance because of its improved [input and output] capabilities. The updated Apache processes use significantly more memory and ran into system limits very quickly under peak load conditions.”

Wood said that once the problem was identified, it was quickly fixed and the system was restored to its normal function.

“We fixed [the problems] by tripling the memory installed in the [Webmail] server, and … service very quickly returned to normal,” he said.

Wood noted that since Oct. 27, three “back-end” portions of the service experienced outages, affecting the pop-mail systems used for accessing the e-mail server, but which appeared to the user to be an outage of the Webmail system.

“These outages affected only a portion of the user population and have been for a variety of hardware failures,” Wood said. “Historically, all these systems have been reliable, and we believe the system, as a whole, will be reliable in the future.”

The outages came within several months of the university’s decision to establish e-mail as the official communication method with students.

The new policy, announced by the office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Joseph W. Watson, indicates that university communications from administrators may be sent exclusively through students’ e-mail.

“Electronic mail has the potential to be a highly cost-effective and timely medium for university officials to communicate messages to students,” the policy states. “This is particularly true in comparison to paper mail. In order for the university to fully realize the cost savings and other benefits of electronic mail, it is essential that students attend to messages that are sent to their official UCSD electronic mail address.”

Watson said that, while no steps have been taken to amend the current communications policy, administrative officials will remain attentive to future problems.

“We try to be alert to difficulties with any and all campus and university policies and regulations and the potential need for changes,” Watson said. “We will monitor how this policy is working and make changes if warranted.”

Despite recent troubles, Watson said he remains confident that the ACS system is in fine working order.

“Electronic systems, like all systems, including e-mail, experience and will experience shut-downs and delays,” Watson said. “Imperfection is inherent in all human systems. As a consequence, our policies and regulations are designed to accommodate temporary problems in the delivery systems. In general, Web-based systems are faster, less costly and more reliable and documentable than the mail and paper. To date, the Web-based system has functioned very well at UCSD and [is] living up to expectations.”

Students said they were occasionally frustrated with the difficulty in checking e-mail, but also explained that they understood the limitations of technology.

“I check my e-mail daily, and I find it really frustrating if I’m not able to access it. However, as I only use my UCSD e-mail for university-linked correspondence, I’m not that bothered by the intermittent problems,” Revelle College junior Gillian Siddall said. “I like the fact that the university is using e-mail for correspondence. … Sometimes though, for important information, I think they should use the mail rather than e-mail, as I pay more attention to letters than e-mails.”