3.1 System Performance

When first launching eClass, the student and teacher users should expect a maximum of 5-8 seconds to sign into the system. As students sign in, the teacher's roster should be updating with attendance information at most 1 second later, if not simultaneously. When performing transactions such as drawing on overlays, electronically chatting with the teacher, or writing notes, the system should be computing them seamlessly: the moment the mouse hits the canvas with a tool, something should be displayed onto the screen within that millisecond.

In terms of storage, an average lecture presentation should be about 40 mb. This average ballpark considers a 30 slide presentation with low quality images on each slide with very few slide transitions. Worst case presentation size could be about 80 mb, although not recommended: the teacher should perhaps try to use very low quality images so to not drastically impact performance, and consider minimizing the presentation to around 50 slides. Meanwhile, depending on how many overlays are created within a lecture session and how many students are logged into a session, the overlay size should be about 40 mb each. For instance, if there are 40 students on average logged into a session, half of them request to use overlays and make 3 each, the total overlay transactions amount to about 2.3 mb in space. In theory, dozens of students can log into the session (could be a remote location), however, to ensure good performance, the teacher should cap the classroom sizes to about 120 students, for say a lecture hall classroom, and 40 for a small size class.

When students save notes (15 rows a page filled with text), say 10 pages a lecture, that shouldn't be a problem for the system unless the local harddrive space cannot support any more space. Lecture notes should only consume about 30 kb at most. Students can perhaps export their notes as .html, .txt or any other text file extensions that are standard.

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