Storyboard Needs and Alternatives

[Clark Boylan]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2022, at 7:20 AM, Marcin Cieslak wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Nov 2022, Clark Boylan wrote:
>
>> * Properly adopt storyboard. Make updating the deployment of storyboard
>>  a priority and take on maintenance of the software itself to try and
>>  address the issues that have been called out that are not already fixed.
>>  This option is unlikely to be successful without help, and we haven't seen
>>  any new interest in helping. We would also likely need to help those
>>  looking to move regardless of this changes of focus. Which creates
>>  an overlap with the next option.
>
> I am mostly lurking here but I decided to have a quick look at
> the Storyboard backend and I think the performance is so bad
> that it has a priority of "Unbreak Now" if some projects are
> even thinking about staying there.
>
> Some API queries to the backend took 2 to 6 seconds to complete
> when invoked from Europe.
>
> Anything like usability/frontend/missing features is secondary
> to that. I think it is worth fixing the perfomance even
> if the projects decide to switch away - the migration can
> take time.
>
> Why is it so bad? Who can have a look at the machine running it
> and the database? Would that be possible to obtain a possibly
> redacted copy of a MySQL database to reproduce the issues locally?
>
> I could have a quick look at it but I am not sure if some crisis
> group could be built to address this promptly and without red tape?

Half of my emails to this thread have asked if anyone is interested in stepping up to do the necessary work without any response. A group could be organized to help, but no one seems interested.

>
> I can see some unfortunate architectural decisions in the code but
> even with them it should not perform that badly for the amount
> of data we have. But it is all guessing until some real performance
> data can be collected from the live environment.

It is my understanding that a number of these issues have been addressed, but at some point the storyboard code base updated in such a way that our aging configuration management for it cannot deploy the latest version. For this reason the first step that should be taken is to update the server and its configuration management so that accurate information can be collected against the current codebase. We can fix the codebase all we want, but if we aren't deploying it we won't see those improvements.

All that to say I don't think a db dump is helpful at this point. What we need are people interested in rewriting the configuration management and upgrading the server if improving storyboard is a goal. Then we can profile, patch, and deploy fixes to improve things from there.

>
> I have joined #storyboard as "saper" to discuss details.
>
> Marcin
> (I made some tiny contributions to git-review and gerrit in the past,
> that's why I'm here)
> Attachments:
> * smime.p7s