Archive for January, 2011

AJAX performance boosts

28 Jan 2011
by in BibGrab, CLUMP, LORLS

Just recently I have been looking at tweaks that I can make to improve the performance of CLUMP.  Here are the ones that I have found make a difference.

Set up apache to use gzip to compress things before passing them to the browser.  It doesn’t make much difference on the smaller XML results being, but on the large chunks of XML being returned it reduces the size quite a lot.

Here is an extract of the apache configuration file that we use to compress text, html, javascript, css and xml files before sending them.

# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

Another thing is if you have a lot of outstanding AJAX requests queued up and the user clicks on something which results in those requests no longer being relevant then the browser will still process those requests. Cancelling them will free up the browser to get straight on with the new AJAX requests.

This can be very important on versions 7 and below of Internet Explorer which only allow 2 concurrent connections to a server over http1.1. If the unneeded AJAX requests aren’t cancelled and just left to complete then it can take Internet Explorer a while to clear the queue out only processing 2 requests at a time.

The good news is that Internet Explorer 8 increases the concurrent number of connections to 6, assuming that you have at least a broadband connection speed, which brings it back into align with most other browsers.

Getting closer to production

24 Jan 2011
by in LORLS

Production release of LORLS6 (aka LUMP) here at Loughborough is going to happen (hopefully) in the next month or so.  In anticipation of that we’ve been doing some installs and imports of the existing reading lists from LORLS5 so that the librarians can have a play with the system.  Its also allowing us to squish a few bugs and develop a few last minute features.  The big test of course comes when the users start to hit the system.

Searching now added to CLUMP

04 Jan 2011
by in CLUMP, LORLS

Last thing I was working on before Christmas was adding searching into CLUMP.  CLUMP’s search function uses LUMP’s FindSuid API to find a list of Module structural units which contain the search term in the selected data element (at the minute the data elements supported are Module Title, Module Code and Academic’s name).

There are two reasons that CLUMP searches for Modules rather than reading lists.  The main reason being, if a module has multiple reading lists it is better to take the user to the module to see all the related reading lists.

The second reason is that all the current data elements that can be searched are related to the module structural units and not the reading list structural units, and it would be a bit convoluted to get a list module structural units and then look up the reading lists for each one.

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