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Optimizing data access for high-latency networks: part I

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

 Punchclock is Encodo’s time-tracking and invoicing tool. It includes a calendar to show time entries (shown to the left). Since the very first versions, it hasn’t opened very quickly. It was fast enough for most users, but those who worked with Punchclock over the WAN through our VPN have reported that it often takes many seconds to open the calendar. So we have a very useful tool that is not often used because of how slowly it opens.

That the calendar opens slowly in a local network and even more slowly in a WAN indicates that there is not only a problem with executing many queries but also with retrieving too much data.

Looking at query statistics

This seemed like a solvable problem, so I fired up Punchclock in debug mode to have a look at the query-statistics window.

To set up the view shown below, I did the following:

  1. Start your Quino application (Punchclock in this case) in debug mode (so that the statistics window is available)
  2. Open the statistics window from the debug menu
  3. Reset the statistics to clear out anything logged during startup
  4. Group the grid by “Meta Class”
  5. Open the calendar to see what kind of queries are generated
  6. Expand the “TimeEntry” group in the grid to show details for individual queries

 Time-entry queries are the problem

I marked a few things on the screenshot. It’s somewhat suspicious that there are 13 queries for data of type “Person”, but we’ll get to that later. Much more suspicious is that there are 52 queries for time entries, which seems like quite a lot considering we’re showing a calendar for a single user. We would instead expect to have a single query. More queries would be OK if there were good reasons for them, but I feel comfortable in deciding that 52 queries is definitely too many.

A closer look at the details for the time-entry queries shows very high durations for some of them, ranging from a tenth of a second to nearly a second. These queries are definitely the reason the calendar window takes so long to load.

Why are these queries taking so long?

If I select one of the time-entry queries and show the “Query Text” tab (see screenshot below), I can see that it retrieves all time entries for a single person, one after another. There are almost six years of historical data in our Punchclock database and some of our employees have been around for all of them.[1] That’s a lot of time entries to load.

 Query text for all time entries for one person

I can also select the “Stack Trace” tab to see where the call originated in my source code. This feature lets me pinpoint the program component that is causing these slow queries to be executed.

 Stack trace for superfluous time-entry queries

As with any UI-code stack, you have to be somewhat familiar with how events are handled and dispatched. In this stack, we can see how a MouseUp command bubbled up to create a new form, then a new control and finally, to trigger a call to the data provider during that control’s initialization. We don’t have line numbers but we see that the call originates in a lambda defined in the DynamicSchedulerControl constructor.

The line of code that I pinpoint as the culprit is shown below.

var people = Session.GetList<Person>().Where(p => p.TimeEntries.Any()).ToList();

This looks like a nicely declarative way of getting data, but to the trained eye of a Quino developer, it’s clear what the problem is.

In the next couple of articles, we’ll take a closer look at what exactly the problem is and how we can improve the speed of this query. We’ll also take a look at how we can improve the Quino query API to make it harder for code like the line above to cause performance problems.


[1]

Encodo just turned nine years old, but we used a different time-entry system for the first couple of years. If you’re interested in our time-entry software history, here it is:

  1. 06.2005—Start off with Open Office spreadsheets
  2. 04.2007—Switch to a home-grown, very lightweight time tracker based on an older framework we’d written (Punchclock 1.0)
  3. 08.2008—Start development of Quino
  4. 04.2010—Initial version of Punchclock 2.0; start dogfooding Quino