Web client: Barcode file upload inflates pcrud drone count

[Jeff Davis]

EG 3.0.2

When uploading a file containing patron or item barcodes, the web client loops through the uploaded file line by line and fires off nearly-simultaneous pcrud requests for each barcode. This tends to inflate the number of pcrud child processes.

Patron barcodes:
1. Go to Circulation > User Buckets > Pending Users.
2. Click "Choose file" and upload a file containing a large number of patron barcodes.

Item barcodes:
1. Go to Circulation > Item Status.
2. Click "Choose file" and upload a file containing a large number of item barcodes.

(I don't see a file upload option for record or copy buckets in 3.0.2.)

The default configuration for open-ils.pcrud has max_children = 15. With this configuration, uploading a file containing 30 or more barcodes will quickly spawn the maximum allowable number of pcrud drones. Increasing pcrud max_children mitigates the issue somewhat but still results in an inflated drone count: for example, with max_children = 100 and uploading 100 barcodes at a time, a single upload spawned 22 separate pcrud drones.

I'm not sure if there is any inherent problem in having a large number of pcrud drones. My gut feeling is that it would be good practice not to use so many separate processes for batch barcode retrieval.

[Bill Erickson (berick)]

Fix for the patron barcode lookup pushed:

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/berick/lp1745499-file-upload-pcrud-blast

I have not looked at the item status UI yet. Removing myself as assignee for now.

[Bill Erickson (berick)]

Fix for item status UI pushed to same branch. This code could not be batched in the same was as the patron barcode lookup code, because it does a more than just issue a pcrud search. I opted to serialize the lookup instead and, since this is one of those rare cases where we know how many of something we are fetching, I added a progress dialog that indicates fetch progress in real time.

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

Looks good to me. Signoff branch here: user/gmcharlt/lp1745499_signoff

[Mike Rylander (mrylander)]

I suspect that copy buckets may exhibit this behavior as well. Looking now...

[Mike Rylander (mrylander)]

My suspicion was based on a false memory of copy buckets have barcode upload. They don't (yet). Nothing to see here, move along...

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

Works for me, also! Pushed to master and rel_3_0.

Thanks, Bill, Galen, and Jeff!