MLS Reading Cloud Performance Issues

[Marcs_Dad]

Hello All,

 

I'm just after a quick response from anybody using the MLS Reading Cloud system, hopefully saving me having to waste a couple of days troubleshooting for Capita!

 

Short story. We went over to the Reading Cloud from hosted Eclipse about 6 weeks ago, and apart from one or two initial niggles, our librarians are pleased with the system. That should read, were pleased with the system until last Thursday, since when performance has fallen off the cliff.

 

Now we have used the same ISP, Net filtering and Anti-virus companies for years, and we have not made any system changes or application changes.

 

The librarians contacted the Help desk, and were told that the problem must be our end, even though it has been working well for over a month. We have started going through their recommended settings and can find no problems at our end. An interesting point is their choice of internet speed test provider (https://speedof.me/) which informed me that I was the lucky 1,000,000 visitor to the site. Their provider showed that I was getting a download speed of 18.27 Mbps and upload of 13.11 Mbps. When I performed the test using the recommended app by emPSN/KCom I got readings of 92.83 Mpbs and 93.93 Mpbs respectively. This I guess can only be down to all the adverts that the site served up. I have attached the results purely for your information.

 

To the point. Has anybody using the Reading Cloud noticed poor performance over the last week?

 

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any feedback.

 

Dave P.

[synaesthesia]

A quick look around this forum will show a generic dislike for MLS's systems, support and indeed very poor performance of their product; many have left as a direct result and many will be in the near future. Performance for us, on a 200Mbit line, is as bad as it's ever been but we're rather used to it now.

[pacapps]

HI Dave,

 

One of the schools I support has been having issues ever since they went over to Reading Cloud.

 

I have lost count of the times I have been directed to the same tec documents and provided evidence that we are configured correctly, they have even remoted into the system and checked the settings themselves.

 

It appears to be working OK(ish) for a while and then slows down / fails to load etc.

 

I have checked that all the sites they want white listing are not blocked (they are not), however some of the sites report as being moved, 404 and 500 errors reported. (I have emailed them the list but had no feed back from them other than they want another remote session).

 

In my experience its always the schools fault and nobody else has issues but a quick check on edugeek proves otherwise.

 

The Librarian has been having issues even when she accesses the system from her home PC, they cant blame the school system for that.

 

I hope you are sitting comfortably because it could be a long ride!

[pete]

We don't use Reading Cloud (I think), but we do use hosted eclipse.net and in the last couple of weeks performance has been terrible.

 

There's no apparent rhyme or reason as to why. Everything's whitelisted (HTTPS interception, content, auth, AV etc) and the issue presents itself in IE, Chrome, Edge and Firefox and we've (yet again) gone through their laundry list of things we've already done.

 

Symptoms are that you can't save changes to a resource or borrower and you'll see "Service call failure retry 0-5" in IE (status bar bottom left).

 

Their support haven't been terribly helpful, but noted that the subdomains https://api-resource.microlibrarian.net and https://resource.microlibrarian.net are related to the issue.

 

We whitelist at the domain (microlibrarian.net) level and the first subdomain (api-resource.microlibrarian.net) resolves correctly.

 

The second subdomain (https://resource.microlibrarian.net) will occasionally throw up a 404 (anecdotally 1 in 5 times) but mostly times out whether going through or proxy as a student, staff member, completely unfiltered or via a 4G connection on a mobile phone. Downforeveryoneorjustme.com concurrs with this.

 

I've added the affected subdomain to our external status page (on uptimerobot.com which is free for 50 checks) to run overnight so we have data for the support call in the morning. So far it's been unavailable for 47 minutes (I added it 47 minutes ago).

Edited July 3, 2018 by pete

[atcoates]

My schools are a similar story with the performance being pretty dire. The product is not fit for purpose and has so many pre reqs and changes needed it's ridiculous. The whole product needs re doing from the ground up to make it just work in a browser!!!

[Katy]

The hosted version has always been awful, it's so slow that our librarian got it in 2012 then barely used it - we discovered when she left that it hadn't been used for 3 years, then attempted to get it set up for the new librarian and gave up. Performance is dire and the support not much better.

[Marcs_Dad]

Thanks Pete, I aim to gather some more information then to try and escalate the problems through the Capita/MLS Helpdesk. It seems that MLS pretty much force people onto the hosted version, only for us then to find out it my not be fit for purpose. I doubt I could roll back to on-site Eclipse now, so we have no other recourse than to jump through all the hoops.

 

If I can get enough data together, then I will attempt to get Private Eye or the BBC involved.

 

My current thinking is that this is one of the busiest if not the actual busiest time of the year for the system, with the librarians attempting to reconcile all the books out with the leavers etc (reminder letters and bills for missing books etc, along with preparing for the new year 7 students coming into the system. So the busiest time of the year = poor performance for everyone.

[Alis_Klar]

What I can't comprehend is why MLS have not setup a test page with a series of green boxes that tests the connection to all the (many) domains it needs to have unfiltered. I am told by my ISP BGfL that the domains have been whitelisted but the poor performance persists. Also as MLS use a large cloud provider surely they can cope with small peaks in demand from schools. C'mon we are not talking a lot of bandwidth here. It hardly YouTube is it?

 

These problems have persisted for a few years now and will the Capita takover make any difference? Who knows?

[atcoates]

My cluster of schools have started to leave MLS now. They seem to favour this...Libresoft Librarian - The Smarter Way To Manage Your Library lot cheaper as well!

[Marcs_Dad]

I understand your logic, as ECDL did that with their agent. It makes troubleshooting much easier, and even allows any problems to be fixed before calling the help desk.

[Marcs_Dad]

Thanks for the information with regards to an alternative. I will pass this on to our librarians.

[Marcs_Dad]

I recently had another run in with Capita-MLS. I had a problem witht syncing AD accounts after migrating to the Reading Cloud from our on premise offering. After two weeks I received an email from level 1 support telling me to use the AD troubleshooter from their website. I had gone through the troubleshooter before placing a support call, then end result of which was the troubleshooter telling me I needed to place a support call.

I kicked off at this point, demanding SLA's and stating that two weeks waiting for a reply to a level 3 serious issue was not acceptable, and that it was there troubleshooter that had told me to place a call. To be fair and transparent, they said that I had not informed them about already running the troubleshooter, and this was true.

A remote support session was arranged, and the level 2 technician spent over two hours to get everything working, so well done to them. When you actually get through to their support, they do seem to be able to fix the problems, but a two week wait is unacceptable, making the product not fit for service.

As mentioned above, you would imagine that they have extra resources available to automatically deal with periods of high demand!