Splash Student Registration and Information

Full Student Registration is now open and will remain open until 8pm (eastern time) on November 13.

For information about Splash, look here.

We apologize for the broken queue on the first night of registration and for the delay in opening full registration. We feel that this deserves some sort of explanation so here goes:

Last year, when Splash registration opened, our server immediately crashed. There were simply too many people trying to access our website (far more than we ever dreamed possible) all at once and our server could not handle the load. Over the past year we have endlessly brainstormed a way to keep our server from crashing when Splash registration opens. One obvious option is to buy several new servers to handle the extra load, but as we are a nonprofit student group, this in not in our budget range. We considered several options, including opening registration at an unannounced time and making all registration work by a random lottery. In the end we decided to open registration such that students could only register for one class on the first day and then be able to register for as many more classes as they wished on all subsequent days, in hopes that this would spread the load on our server over several days. We also decided to implement a queue system so that only a certain number of people could access our website at any given time, thus also cutting down on server load. These changes involved a restructuring of the back-end of our website, which our dedicated (all-volunteer) web administration team spent many sleepless nights on.

The day before registration opened, we rigorously tested every aspect of our registration system, including loading our server with over 150 simultaneous users. Any bugs that came up were promptly fixed, the queue was operational, and our server had no problems with the load. We had every reason to believe that we were ready for registration the next day. At 8pm, when single-class registration opened, our website was immediately bombarded with almost 2,000 users, all trying to register or browse the catalog at once. While our server did not crash per se, it was certainly very unhappy, and it expressed its rage by kicking people out of the queue and showing anyone who was trying to register various errors which we had never seen before. The following morning, we desperately searched for a newer, much-faster server which we could temporarily borrow for the opening of full registration, and around 6:30pm we finally managed to find one. Unfortunately, it took roughly three hours to retrieve this server, set it up, and transfer our database and website to it, accounting for the delay in the opening of full registration.

Again, our deepest apologies for the trouble.