The recent Blackboard 9.1 SP8 upgrade introduced a bug with the authentication code, causing a memory leak, which over time leads to the problems recently experienced with the Blackboard system. To reduce the risk of similar incidents, the Blackboard application servers will be rebooted on a daily basis between 3 AM and 4 AM, until a patch for this issue is fully tested.
The vendor has informed us that another institution running the same version as Ryerson reported the same problem. This other institution has not fully tested the patch provided by Blackboard, and has also implemented a daily reboot of the application servers as a temporary fix to the problem. At this stage, we have deployed the patch in our test environment and so far the sanity testing carried out has showed good results. We are planning to perform additional load testing to ensure that the patch corrects the problem, and we will deploy it to the production system following a positive outcome.
We will provide periodic status updates of our testing.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
-Computing and Communications Services