[Koha-devel] Replace Catmandu indexing code with pure perl and eventually drop Catmandu as a Koha dependency

[David Cook]

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

Ultimo, NSW 2007

Australia

 

Office: 02 9212 0899

Direct: 02 8005 0595

 

From: koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org [mailto:koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of David Gustafsson
Sent: Thursday, 17 May 2018 11:57 PM
To: Koha-devel at 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.org/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

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