[Portfolio] Slow-downs
Noah Botimer
botimer at umich.edu
Tue May 19 10:56:27 PDT 2009
Marc,
You've done a masterful job. I will only add that we are looking into
this issue very seriously at Michigan. It's somewhat likely that we
will end up engineering a new form finding mechanism for our Fall
term. We will certainly keep the group posted.
Thanks,
-Noah
On May 19, 2009, at 12:37 PM, Marc Zaldivar wrote:
> Sean,
>
> Teggin said that yesterday in the call you were discussing the
> “form searching slow-down” issue. Yes, VT hit this one pretty hard
> this semester, and I know Michigan has also been faced with a
> growing issue from this. We spent a couple of hours on the phone
> with Noah talking over some solutions, and though I didn’t talk to
> him, I know our dev group also talked with Chuck Hedrick too.
>
> The breakdown of the issue came for us because we are using so many
> of the “UROP”-type portfolios for our templates, which are
> basically using form pages for each tab of a final display
> portfolio, in our case sometimes as many as 17 or 18 different
> forms for each complete portfolio (sometimes they were limitlessly
> repeatable, so some students may have had upwards of 30 forms to
> put into different slots in the template). Each time the “Save
> Changes” button is hit, it would search the database 5 times per
> slot per form instance, making that sometimes 1000s of searches per
> creation attempt. When you do this in a demonstration with 25-30
> kids in the room (ok, now everyone push “Save Changes...”), it’s
> fatal. Even without that, given the activity ramp-up we are
> seeing, we were seeing an average of 60+ seconds for new users, and
> for folks like me that own a lot of forms, it was often beyond our
> threshold for database link-up at 10 minutes or something
> ridiculous. So, big big problem that is only going to get bigger
> as we expand. (We had at that time about 4k forms out of 250k
> items in the database.)
>
> Ultimately, we tested several solutions, with the big two being (1)
> a patch that Noah/rSmart came up with that (I think) refined the
> search parameters without limiting it to My Workspace, creating a
> cache that was searched repeatedly rather than having to keep
> hitting the database time and again, and (2) Chuck Hedrick’s
> solution to limit all searching to the My Workspace first.
> Ultimately, #2 was faster on our test speeds. We felt that maybe
> #1 would be a better long-term solution, but that it would take
> some real time to refine that search protocol and build the cache
> effectively. Hopefully, we’ll still work toward that ultimate
> solution. However, we deployed #2 and saw my admin account’s wait
> time drop from 10+minutes to about 18 seconds. Average users are
> now 2-5 seconds tops. Much, much better so far.
>
> Do you see any potential for problems if presentations are being
> created from forms created through a matrix? Mostly, I’d assume
> that these forms would be located in the various Portfolio
> Interaction folders, in the MW. The one potential is for non-
> matrix portfolios, you’d have to specify the need to store forms in
> a folder in the MW rather than in a course drop box or resource area.
>
> Just thought I’d share our perspective on the issue. Noah, please
> feel free to detail out my all to0 non-tech-savvy description of
> your patch and what it does!
>
> Marc Z
> --
> Marc Zaldivar,
> Ph.D.
> 2210A Torgersen Hall
> Director, Virginia Tech Electronic Portfolio Initiatives
> Blacksburg, VA 24061-0292
> Learning
> Technologies
> 540.231.8994
> Virginia
> Tech
> marcz at vt.edu
>
>
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