Getting Ready for ACEweb Opening Day Registration Tips

For many of our ACEware clients, there comes a time of year when registration opens, and they experience a huge rush of registrations in a short period of time (looking at you OLLI!).

Here are some essential things to check before you open the gates, to make sure your registrants are getting the best possible ACEweb experience without any of the slowdowns or hang-ups! You can always check with your ACEware technician for assistance with this checkup.

Student Manager/ACEweb Updates

Apply Student Manager and ACEweb updates before opening day. Preferably the week before so you have time to run some basic tests before opening day. We recommend you speak with your ACEware Technician about available updates.

Test ACEweb

Test basic functions like creating a Name account, registering and paying for a class, and receipt of email confirmation. You should also look at your Course listings and make sure your courses are showing in the correct groups, etc.

Enable Additional COM Servers

Make sure your ACEweb installation is configured to run enough COM servers to fully utilize the server that it's running on. The general rule of thumb is to run two COM servers per CPU core, and ideally have at least 1GB of RAM per COM server.

For example, a quad core server with 8GB of RAM can easily run 8 COM servers. Your ACEware technician can assist you with what to ask your IT folks to determine what server hardware is being used, as well as audit your COM server configuration.

Disable Full Debugging

Disable full debug logging for your heaviest registration period.

Change the debug logging options in the DebugFlag INI setting in your ACEweb.ini. We recommend you log payment service information in the event you must look up something that went wrong with an online payment, so you can set your setting to:

DebugFlag=TABLE:FLAGS:PYSRV

This ensures that you're using the faster logging method (TABLE:), but that you only want to log payment service details, and not everything.

Disable Antivirus

Speak with your IT team about the Antivirus or firewall software on the server. We strongly recommend that it has the appropriate exclusions for the ACEweb (i.e. inetpub\aceweb and its contents and the inetpub\wwwroot and its contents) and Student Manager folders.

If those folders are not excluded, it can dramatically slow or even halt the ACEweb COM server processing.

Disable Realtime Virus Scanning

Student Manager and ACEweb folders should always be excluded from real time virus scanning.

Applying updates to antivirus software and firewall software, or applying Windows updates if using Windows Defender, can re-enable settings like real time virus scanning. So it's very important to check these settings before opening day and disable them, if necessary.

Note, real time virus scanning can dramatically slow or even halt the ACEweb COM server processing.

QuickPick Users-Disable Logging

Make sure that the EXTENDEDLOGGING setting in the QuickPick.ini is set to OFF.