Re: Assessment of Allura at SourceForge

[Trevor Daniels]

Trevor Daniels wrote Sunday, May 17, 2015 9:33 AM
Subject: Assessment of Allura at SourceForge


> Hi
> 
> I've now completed my assessment of Allura at SourceForge against the list of 
> requirements supplied by Phil.
>
> There are some differences from GoogleCode, but these are relatively minor 
> and can be accommodated by small changes in our procedures.  In particular 
> the Blocking and Duplicate facilities will be different, and the various 
> posts in the discussion are fully threaded and so are not numbered, meaning 
> cross-referencing is by link rather than number.  The emails sent out 
> following additions and amendments are not formatted as nicely as those from 
> GoogleCode, but contain all the information.  Support is by +ve and -ve 
> voting rather than starring.  Finally, the Owner field in the transferred 
> tickets is not populated.  The owner is identified in the text of the ticket, 
>  so the field can be manually amended after the event in the few tickets 
> where this matters.
> 
> Other than that the facilities are remarkably similar, and apart from 
> congestion the transfer of the DB is fairly trouble-free.

I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the loading of Allura at SourceForge, 
maybe due to other projects attempting to migrate from GoogleCode.  After 
exporting our Issues DB on Sat evening and modifying the Post authors to 
"GoogleImporter" I attempted to re-import it.  During Saturday evening, all day 
on Sunday, and early on Monday my attempt was rejected due to the load on the 
server.  The import request was finally accepted on Monday afternoon, but 
failed after loading about a quarter of the issues.  No details given.  I 
initiated the import again late on Monday evening, and this had completed 
successfully by early Wed morning, after running for 33 hours.  So weekends are 
a dead loss, and altogether it took me almost 5 days just to re-import the DB.

Furthermore, I've observed today that searches are frequently rejected with 
"Errno 111 Connection refused", another symptom of server overload.

Maybe we need to pursue an alternative server to SourceForge urgently.
 
> I'm in the process of tailoring a test facility for developers and admin to 
> play with, and as a vehicle for re-engineering git-cl and patchy.  I'll post 
> again when this is ready.

In spite of the frustrations I have prepared a test bed for developers, admins, 
bug-squad and users to play with.  It's at 
https://sourceforge.net/p/testlily/tickets/ .  It is populated with the all the 
Issues from GoogleCode up to around 7 May 2015.  I've added all the extra 
fields needed to accommodate our practices and created several useful searches. 
 This is what it would be like after migration.

*** We now need others to try all the actions they would normally do with the 
Issues DB to expose any further problems. ***

Anyone can search and read the issues, but to try creating new issues, posting 
to them or editing them you'll need to get a SourceForge account and let me 
have the resulting user name, saying whether you want to play as Admin, Devel 
or Member, so I can give you the appropriate permissions.  Feel free to modify 
individual Issues, but don't delete them all!

We still, of course, need to rework the several scripts.

Trevor