2016-06-30 Meeting notes: Discussions Performance and Architecture

Date

30 Jun 2016

Attendees

• Robert Raposa, Andy Armstrong (Deactivated), Brian Jacobel (Unlicensed), Dave Ormsbee, Toby Lawrence (Deactivated)

• Optional (not attending): Diana Huang 

Goals

• Meeting 1: Status update and go forward plan for performance work
• Meeting 2: Discuss future design and determine next steps for XBlockTab

Meeting Discussion items

Adjust performance tests:

• Complete clean-up and merge existing performance tests and seeding
  • Create story for fast fail on Discussion API query params that aren't indexed
  • Link PR for Chris's original changes that didn't land.
• Enhance performance tests
  • How should we manage LMS (Web) Discussions vs Discussion API load testing?
  • We should start with fresh seed every time. How long will this take?
  • Start with read-only testing.
    • Why does performance slow linearly with the number of threads in a course? Related to lack of paging on main page?

Potential performance fix ideas (before testing):

• Consider limits: Limit on threads in course? Responses and comments?
• Not highest priority: Ruby garbage collection tuning:
  • https://meta.discourse.org/t/tuning-ruby-and-rails-for-discourse/4126

Discussion refactor:

• XBlockTab:
  • Possibly start with Course scopes which have agreement.  Where should these be stored?  Talk to Calen Pennington (Deactivated).
  • Preferred to treat Discussions as a feature and get tab by default.
  • Tab could be enabled by default on Mobile as webview.  (See other background from Andy Armstrong (Deactivated) and others in TNL-2319 - Getting issue details... STATUS ) 
  • Add capabilities through xblock views
  • Keep extension points of stevedore and add xblock tabs as new feature
  • For additional background, see:
    • Discovery: Course-wide discussions
    • XBlockTabs discussion on edx-code
• Moving Discussions to its own repo
  • Could Discussions run stand-alone through workbench?
  • Teams: 
    • Handling js loading across XBlock and Teams. 
    • Can we use the XBlock in Teams? 
      • Proposed iframe for xblock rendering (in Teams), or teams rendering an xblock for topic id, authorization (in django) (how can this be done across repos)
    • Can we have authorization that both can use?
    • Are there joins across discussions and teams?
  • Review lms notifier endpoints

Discussion enhancements:

• New unit level topics: 
  • Possibly would want to use Asides to implement unit level in-line discussions.
  • Note MIT use case of re-using Inline Topic across units.  This was mentioned to Marco Morales (Deactivated), and he is aware, but we may start with simplest cases first.
• Notifications. 
  • What needs to be tracked?
  • Interesting mobile push notification discussion: https://meta.discourse.org/t/mobile-push-notifications/38051

Action items

• Robert Raposa: Create story for fast fail on Discussion API query params that aren't indexed
• Robert Raposa, Diana Huang: Continue performance story using input from above:  TNL-4846 - Getting issue details... STATUS
• Robert Raposa: Follow up with Braden MacDonald on XBlockTab discussion.
• Andy Armstrong (Deactivated), Dave Ormsbee, Toby Lawrence (Deactivated): Please add or correct any notes above.  Thank you!