[Portfolio] Slow-downs

[Sean Keesler]

As far as I know, almost no one asks students to go off and create New
Form Items in resources using the "New Form Item" option. Portfolio
experiences tend to be scaffolded with matrices or wizards and will
soon be able to be scaffolded directly with the portfolio tool since
students can create new form content from there.

The "Create from resources" functionality is a nifty feature (I guess)
but practically, it doesn't seem to have a lot of practical
application. So Marc's comment about restricting searches for content
to My Workspace folders (maybe even to JUST Portfolio Interaction)
would make a ton of sense, with the option for students to be able to
"browse about" resources for stragglers in other sites that they want
to use.

Sean



On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Noah Botimer <botimer at umich.edu> wrote:
> Yes, this is correct. Our CONTENT_RESOURCE table has the RESOURCE_TYPE_ID
> column populated.
> There are two kinds of content conversion: 1) breaking various attributes
> out into columns and populating them, and 2) converting the XML column to
> the BINARY_ENTITY serialization. If I recall correctly, there were batch and
> online modes for some of this.
> All of the details are not clear to me including what happens automatically,
> what is required to run on 2.5 and beyond, and the impacts on the form
> searching in a 2.6.x environment (getResourcesOfType vs. findResources)
> "without conversion" (if that's possible).
> Thanks,
> -Noah
> On May 19, 2009, at 1:59 PM, Maurer, Christopher Wayne wrote:
>
> Noah,
> You guys have run the content conversion already, right?  So all your forms
> should have the type pulled out into it’s own column?  Well, not the form
> type, but the fact that the resource item is a form?
>
> Chris
>
>
> On 5/19/09 1:56 PM, "Noah Botimer" <botimer at umich.edu> wrote:
>
> 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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