We don't have as many users as other schools but we have made the portal 
guest page the default in the clusters and on kiosks around campus for a 
long time.  We also decided to have some interactive content on the 
guest page - specifically the directory lookup.  The performance has 
never been a problem (300-500 sessions).  The performance problems we 
experience now are more related to heavy use of ajax and javascript 
which we have now largely curtailed on the guest pages.  We set a very 
short inactivity time out (2 minutes I think).  When users login they 
get reset to a longer timeout value. 

The short time out created a little problem because people would walk up 
to a screen displaying the portal with timed out sessions.  They would 
begin by typing a name into the directory lookup, hit search and the 
page would just refresh - new session.  So we modified the portal 
session manager and login interaction to maintain the url parameters 
across sessions - this allows our guest page to behave more like a 
static page.  Changing tabs needs the same altered flow to avoid the 
user experience that the tab change didn't work.

Other folks I have heard of make the entire guest page static - or PHP 
or something else.  I don't think you'd want more than one tab in that 
case though.

Just my thoughts.
Susan

Parker Grimes wrote:
> I would also be interested to know how other schools have approached 
> this. We are considering making the portal guest page the default 
> browser home page on all of our campus computer labs. We wouldn't want 
> the page to be completely static, for instance we would like a weather 
> portlet and some campus news RSS feeds to be displayed. It seems like 
> a waste of our uPortal resources to be required to render all of that 
> stuff all of the time. What about "mimicking" the portal home page 
> with a simpler technology like php, ruby, or django? Or is it not that 
> big of an issue to just let uPortal handle the load assuming we have 
> caching working on our side?
>
> Parker
> Programmer / Analyst
> Southern Utah University
>
>
> On 7/31/07, *George Lindholm* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
>
>     Hi all,
>       I'm thinking about putting a static version of the guest page in
>     front
>     of our
>     uPortal to minimize the guest sessions. So I just wondering what other
>     sites have done and what their experiences have been?
>
>     Thanks
>
>        George
>
>     --
>     [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>      
>     ITServices, UBC
>     Senior Programmer Analyst
>
>     phone:    604.822.4375       fax:      604.822.5116
>
>
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