I'm regering to a book return / bookdrop machine machine, where books are returned when patrons put them in. With Catmandu there will be a significant delay between each return. Compile step was perhaps the wrong term to use. I havn't dug that deep in what causes this, but I would guess that it's the Fix language parsing/conversion to perl code that has this overhead. Don't think plack would help. Would perhaps be possible to cache the resulting perl code if this is the culprit, but this would not improve the time of a full reindex significantly since biblios are indexed in batches, and the startup overhead will only occur once per batch. I actually used NYTProf when developing the patch and the benchmarks can be found as attachment s in the bugzilla issue. David måndag 21 maj 2018 skrev David Cook <dcook@prosentient.com.au>:
When you say “machine where you return books”, are you referring to a self-checkout machine or a computer where staff are checking in books manually?
When you say “Catmandu has some kind of compile step”, what do you mean by “compile”? If you’re using Plack, surely we should be pre-loading Catmandu and thus any compilation will already have happened? Admittedly I don’t use Plack with Koha, so I wouldn’t know if that’s how they’re doing it, but I use Plack with other systems and preload all the time-consuming modules to speed things up.
If you want to see what’s the problem exactly, I’d suggest using https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Profiling_with_Devel::NYTProf. That should show you where you are losing time.
David Cook
Systems Librarian
Prosentient Systems
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*From:* David Gustafsson [mailto:glasklas@gmail.com] *Sent:* Friday, 18 May 2018 7:43 PM *To:* David Cook <dcook@prosentient.com.au> *Cc:* Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org *Subject:* Re: [Koha-devel] Replace Catmandu indexing code with pure perl and eventually drop Catmandu as a Koha dependency
“the book drop machine” = machine where you return books. It does not matter if using Plack or not, Catmandu has some kind of compile step or similar that has a startup time of a couple of seconds. So everytime one returned a book (and the biblio was updated and indexed) there was a delay of a couple of seconds, if returning multiple books is a major issue.
Best Regards
David
2018-05-18 2:33 GMT+02:00 David Cook <dcook@prosentient.com.au>:
I don’t do anything with Elastic or Catmandu at the moment, so I won’t comment about that.
But you mention the overhead of Catmandu start-up. Can you speak more to that? What’s “the book drop machine”? Why isn’t Catmandu running in a persistent process?*
*I say as someone who still uses Koha using CGI rather than Plack…
David Cook
Systems Librarian
Prosentient Systems
72/330 Wattle St <https://maps.google.com/?q=72/330+Wattle+St+Ultimo,+NSW&entry=gmail&source=g>
Ultimo, NSW <https://maps.google.com/?q=72/330+Wattle+St+Ultimo,+NSW&entry=gmail&source=g> 2007
Australia
Office: 02 9212 0899
Direct: 02 8005 0595
*From:* koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org [mailto: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org] *On Behalf Of *David Gustafsson *Sent:* Thursday, 17 May 2018 11:57 PM *To:* Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org *Subject:* [Koha-devel] Replace Catmandu indexing code with pure perl and eventually drop Catmandu as a Koha dependency
Hi all!
I have been working on replacing Catmandu depandant indexing code with a simpler and faster Koha-specific one using the Search::Elasticsearch package (which Catmandu uses internally): https://bugs.koha-community.or g/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=19893
Some of the benefits would be:
1) Increased indexing performance (about twice as fast, six times as fast if comparing time spent in update_index()), due to more efficient json-conversion and fewer Elasticsearch requests.
2) With Catmandu indexing speed decreases as more mappings are added, with the alternative algorithm indexing is kept more or less constant no matter how many mappings you add.
3) Neglectable indexing start-up time. Especially noticeable when indexing a single document. For example we have an issue with the book drop machine, each return taking a couple of seconds because of the Catmandu start-up overhead (or when saving biblios in staff client).
4) More transparent code and less complexity compared with Catmandu (admittedly partly subjective statement) should lead to improved maintainability and increased stability.
5) No need for new developers to learn the Fix language
6) Closer to the metal so easier to perform even more Koha-specific optimizations and customizations which might not be feasible with Catmandu in tthe way
The proposed patch only addresses the indexing logic but the remaining Catmandu-dependant code (mainly for searching) should be pretty trivial to replace with Search::Elasticsearch implementation which can be done as a next step.
Would be wonderful if this could be raised for discussion at the next developers meeting.
Best regards
David Gustafsson