Best practice forum (Archived)

Program assignment

 
Mei Chan
Program assignment
by Mei Chan - Monday, 23 February 2015, 12:55 PM
 

Hi - just want to get an idea how long it normally take for assigning audiences to program?

We've been assigning 100 users via 1 audience to a program with one course, and the screen would freeze for 2 minutes during this assignment. With 500 users it took almost 20 minutes! The users was taking course just fine without performance issue and just wondering if anyone experience the same and how this is resolved. 

Appreciate for any feedback.

Tom Ireland
Re: Program assignment
by Tom Ireland - Friday, 6 March 2015, 7:58 AM
Group Totara

Hi, Mei

If you're adding an audience to a program (where it's not been assigned already), it shouldn't take too long. I would advise checking in with your Totara Solution Partner in the first instance to query it and if there appears to be an issue they can raise a ticket with us via the helpdesk to investigate it further.

Once an audience has been assigned, the cron (essentially a task that runs in the background) will take care of audience member assignments to programs.

Thanks.

Tom

? ?
Re: Program assignment
by ? ? - Tuesday, 17 March 2015, 10:26 PM
 

Performance improvements to program assignments were included in the release of 2.7.0 on the 2nd March; and 2.6.18 today (18th March)

Mei Chan
Re: Program assignment
by Mei Chan - Wednesday, 18 March 2015, 3:49 PM
 

Oh. Thanks Ciaran on the update!

May I have the details of the improvement?

We're still tackling the and before knowing this improvement we were looking at two approach suggested by totara partner

- increase no. of email sent per session from 1 to 25: doesn't seem to improve anything...
- looking to use sendmail/postfix instead of relay

David Curry (Core Developer)
Re: Program assignment
by David Curry (Core Developer) - Wednesday, 18 March 2015, 5:09 PM
Group Totara

Hi Mei,

During 2.7 Q/A we found that some Programs were taking a long time to assign a relatively small amount of users on some setups, we traced it back to the Program enrolment emails. The actual enrolments were happening pretty quickly (especially after performance improvements from T-13477) but the emails were hanging the page while they all sent, which was a slow process. So in this latest patch we moved Program enrolment messages out of instant events and on to the cron so they would send in the background, they won't be instantaneous any more but the program messages cron job should be run fairly regularly so there shouldn't be much delay.

If you are on on a version before 2.5.23, 2.6.16, or 2.7.0 I would recommend upgrading to get the T-13477 performance improvements, however your issue does sound more like the emails issue. To check that the enrolment emails are the cause of your delay I would go to the messages tab of the program in question, remove all enrolment messages, and enrol some users. If there is a marked improvement in the time taken then your issue is probably the recently merged T-13966 (2.6.18 and 2.7.0) and I would suggest upgrading to one of the latest releases.

Cheers,
David

Mei Chan
Re: Program assignment
by Mei Chan - Thursday, 19 March 2015, 3:15 PM
 

Hi David,

That's very awesome. Thank you for getting back to this.

Thanks,
Mei

Mei Chan
Re: Program assignment
by Mei Chan - Sunday, 22 March 2015, 9:18 PM
 

Hi David,

We retested it following your suggestions - yes it's much much quicker after removing all enrolment messages!!!

Thank you very much addressing this issue!

Cheers,
Mei