Performance about moodle-block_course_overview_campus

[abias]

Hi,

I'm sorry to hear that you have problems with my block.
After I have inherited the block from another developer, we have added many features and I have to admit that the block has grown to be mostly a large function with spaghetti code. So, performance problems are possible.

On the other hand, I remember adopting all recent changes from block_course_overview, especially the things which are mentioned in https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-34785.

It will take some days until I am able to have a deeper look at the performance of the block.
Could you please answer some questions in the meantime:

• If users experiencing performance problems remove the block, is the performance acceptable again?
• Do all users with more than 20 courses experience the performance problems? Are there performance differences between users with more than 20 courses which have no news and users with more than 20 courses which have many news (forum posts, assignments....)?
• Did you set MAX_MODINFO_CACHE_SIZE in your config.php? If yes, which value does it have?

Alex

[abias]

Dear Alex,

I just published version 2.6 of the block and would like to have a look at the performance topics finally. Could you please answer my questions above so that I can work on it?

Alex

[abias]

Dear Alex,

I finally had the chance to look at the performance problems, but I was not able to reproduce your problems.

I am using the same code to get course news as the core course_overview block, so I think the ticket you are referring to should be solved for block_course_overview_campus, too.

Of course, block_course_overview_campus gets course news of all of the user's courses and it does this even if there is only a course subset displayed in the course list because of active course filters. This produces a quite high DB load when the block is shown. I am thinking about if this can be improved with more AJAX or better usage of the Moodle caching mechanisms.

But, again, I was only able to get page loads up to 2-3 sec with approx. 450 DB reads for a user with a quite long course list (> 50 courses), I did not experience 10+ sec page load times.

I think you don't need to answer my questions from 3 months ago, some of them are nonsense. But I'd like to ask you now

• to test the 2.6 version of the block to see if the problem still exists in 2.6
• to disable the course news in the plugin (possible in the 2.6 version) to see if this will reduce the page load time significantly
• to remove block_course_overview_campus and use the core block_course_overview block (with a list length > amount of courses to display all courses) to see if this core block will show the course list quicker than my block

Thanks,
Alex

[alekiy]

Hello Alex,
finally I found some time to test the performance.
The latest contribution as well as the cache improvements fixed the problems.
So you may close the issue. Thx.

[abias]

Great :) Thank you for the feedback!

[zozoh94]

Hello @abias,
I have the same problem with Moodle 3.5.9 and your plugin in version v3.5-r2 (2018092600).
Can the enablecoursenews value still be a problem ?
I didn't touch MAX_MODINFO_CACHE_SIZE value.
Thanks for your help.