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

Date

Jun 30, 2016

Attendees

• @Robert Raposa, @Andy Armstrong (Deactivated), @Brian Jacobel (Unlicensed), @Dave Ormsbee (Deactivated), @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 https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/TNL-2319) 

  • 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