ubuntu-translations-coordinators team mailing list archive

[Jeroen Vermeulen <jtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello folks,

As you probably know we rolled out Launchpad 2.2.7 last week.  That 
version made some performance-related improvements for the Translations 
app that I thought you might like to know about.

= UI Timeouts =

We're still seeing a few timeouts, but much fewer than before.  The main 
sources a month ago were the list of Ubuntu templates in a language, and 
one or two users consistently requesting translation pages with the full 
300 translatable strings on them.

For the templates listing, we fixed the awkward way the page fetched its 
data.  This also opened the way for even more optimization, but for now 
the timeouts are pretty much below our radar.

For the second, we limited translate pages to 50 translatable strings. 
Again, the timeouts for this page pretty much went away completely.

We may do more work on timeouts the next time we lower the timeout 
threshold on Launchpad, but for now, the combined timeouts from the 
Translations app are down in the "noise level."

= Language Packs =

We finally got rid of a database view we used to produce exports.  We'd 
been wanting to do that for a long time and frankly, performance wasn't 
even the main reason why we did.

But it did seem to help!  We just produced a Karmic language pack with 
64K translation files in about 7 hours 20 minutes.

For comparison, we previously did one of 23K files in more time than 
that (9 hours 40 minutes) and a 73K-file one took 28 hours.  A recent 
Intrepid language pack of 43K files took 13 hours.

It's not safe to compare Karmic's sharing exports to older non-sharing 
exports, but some irresponsible extrapolation suggests a Karmic speedup 
for Karmic that's somewhere between 3x and 4x.  If we see similar 
improvements for the older, non-sharing Ubuntu releases we can start to 
consider more aggressive schedules for handing off the tarballs to 
Ubuntu-side processing.

(It'd also be possible to produce more language packs but as I 
understand it, there's no real need.  And it's not like this leaves the 
servers sitting idle.)


Jeroen