[Building Sakai] Why hasn't Recent Announcements slowed your performance?

[Keli Sato Amann]

Hello
One of the issues slowing performance on our campus is the fact that Recent Announcements widget queries old sites, which are not likely to have recent announcements. After a particularly slow day, we recently removed the Recent Announcements widget altogether and things seemed to be much better. We made a local fix to our 2.6 instance which prevented hidden sites from being included in search of Announcements, but few people opt to hide sites so we didn't have enough confidence that this alone would improve performance.

There are a few ways we could address this so we can add that widget back
1) encourage users to hide sites with improved design
2) force course sites to be hidden after 2 years (we could do it more frequently, but some course admins like to refer to older sites), but make it more obvious how to find these hidden sites.
3) make course sites that are older than a quarter not show up in Recent Announcements search, regardless of whether they are hidden or active.

Regardless of which direction we decide to go, we are surprised that this hasn't been a problem for other schools who have used the CLE longer and with more classes. We suspect it may be because other schools remove rosters from course sites and include new rosters every term, such that students don't have active sites from more than a year ago.  Here, we create new sites for each new term a course is taught so students and instructors have 4 or more courses (some local admins have hundreds of courses). Perhaps you also encourage instructors to unpublish sites after the term--we don't here, because we think students like to refer to old course materials as they prep for new course, or as they prepare to leave and need to put a portfolio together, but I suppose we could force them to gather material before the term.

If anyone who uses Recent Announcements in My Workspace has more thoughts on this, we'd be curious.

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing Services, Stanford University