Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Shilen Patel <>]

Responses below.



GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing wrote:
> Hi Shilen,
>
> Some responses and questions below.
>
> Regards,
>
> Gary
>
> --On 12 December 2006 15:17 -0500 Shilen Patel 
> <>
>  wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have Grouper 1.1 installed with about 72,000 groups and 460,000
> > members.  After adding all these groups and members, I've noticed
> > performance issues like the following:
> >
> >
> > 1.  In the Grouper UI, using the "Manage Groups" link stalls.  
> > However, I
> > have no problems using "All Groups".
> Is 'Create Groups' similarly slow? Is searching slow?

I can enter the "Create Groups" page quickly, but the search is slow 
depending on what I search.  I think if I search under a stem where the 
user has many memberships or privileges, the search will stall.

> Both options call:
> member.hasAdmin()
> member.hasUpdate()
>
> Manage Groups also calls
> member.hasStem()
> member.hasCreate()
>
> These calls are made so that the UI can filter out stems which don't 
> have manageable groups. It would be possible to come up with a 
> configuration setting which would avoid these calls - and so should 
> perform as 'All Groups' does, however, you would be able to browse 
> down dead ends.
>
> blair: The UI would work OK if it were possible to ask:
> does Stem S have any descendant Groups where Subject subj has a 
> privilege from [update, admin,...]. This might not be straightforward 
> to determine, but would avoid the member.has calls.
>
> > 2.  Since the ALL subject is granted read and view privileges to all of
> > the groups, method calls like Member.hasRead() and Member.hasView() can
> > take hours.
> Granting of read and view privileges to GrouperAll is optional and the 
> default privileges granted configurable, but if it is appropriate to 
> your scenario then we have to figure out what is reasonable behaviour 
> when the number of groups returned is in the 1000's

In our scenario, the default read and view privileges are appropriate.  
Does any place in the UI call member.hasRead() or member.hasView() ?
> > 3.  I have an instance where a Group X has admin privileges to about
> > 20,000 groups.   It takes about an hour to add a member to Group X
> > because the new member is indirectly given admin privileges to the 
> > 20,000
> > groups.
> >
> >
> > Have issues like these been addressed?  Will they be resolved in a 
> > future
> > version of Grouper?  Any tips on how I can perform these operations
> > faster?
> As we get feedback from sites implementing Grouper in real world 
> situations and with large repositories we will attempt to resolve the 
> issues that come up. Those that are a barrier to uptake of the product 
> are likely to be dealt with first. There is fairly limited experience 
> of working with large repositories, and how Grouper and the UI perform 
> may well vary according to how repositories are structured.
>
> Would you be able to provide an overview of how your repository is 
> structured? i.e. how many top level stems are there and how deep does 
> the hierarchy go?

We have a root stem duke with 4 stems -- employees, students, oit, and 
siss.  The employees stem has 4 groups that contain about 80,000 
memberships.  The students stem also has 4 groups with about 20,000 
memberships.  The oit stem has about 50 small groups and 2 large 
groups.  The two large groups are nested 4 levels under the top level 
oit stem.  These two groups have large groups from the employees and 
students stems as members.  Finally, the siss group contains our class 
roster data with student, instructor, and TA groups for each class.  
Except for one group, all groups in the siss stem are nested 7 levels 
deep.  The total number of memberships in the siss stem is about 
230,000.  The exception group is a group that has admin privileges to 
all of the TA groups.  This is the Group X that I mentioned above.


Thanks,

-- Shilen