Forum OpenACS Development: Simplification of Assessment

Based on this experience I would love to see an assessment UI that distinguishes between survey and assessment at all levels (assessment, section and question), because now have to take out the assessment specific elements for our clients "by hand". However, I do not see a need for a more detailed distinction at the moment.

BTW, why not calling "Assessment & Survey" instead of "Assessment". Could be that a majority of usages are in "survey mode" although this is not reflected in the name.

I guess at Galileo we got the pre-eduardo's commit asm version, which has no many option, though we still think needs to be simplified.

Now we are working on making it scalable, for serving asm and procesing answers, more comming soon!

We will be cooperating on getting assessment tidy for .LRN 2.2 so please commit any local fixes (not features) you have soon to the oacs-5-2 branch.

For now we are tending towards removing all the options mentioned in my previous post and leaving "New Assessment".

Please complain or fix now, if you are using this untested/broken "feature" and are willing to help get it in.

If we work on it we will fight for just going with 2 or a maximum of 3 different assessment creation options: "New Simple Survey" (as per Bernd's post), "New Simple Quiz/Test", and "New Custom Suvey/Quiz/Test" (this one would give you all the options) for example.

Speak now, or wait for the next release round.

After error log analysis and some stress tests (which do not really simulate multiple users due to the lack of this feature in tclwebtest) our approach to follow is to remove the item data versioning (i.e. not to use the CR for item data) and to offer either a "Light Assessment" option to the user or parameter to the administrator.

We will keep on posting our results in order to help others with similar issues.

but this is in a development instance.

In production, we get deadlocks at several queries:
Creating a new answer to a question:

ERROR: deadlock detected
DETAIL: Process 2988 waits for ShareLock on transaction 3017009599; blocked by process 2989.
Process 2989 waits for ShareLock on transaction 3017009471; blocked by process 2988.
SQL:

select content_item__new('24696117-24696253-25620217','25516644',NULL,NULL,NULL,'24303066',NULL,
'10.0.0.20','content_item','as_item_data',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'file')


Inserting a session revision:

ERROR: deadlock detected
DETAIL: Process 2975 waits for ShareLock on transaction 3017009950; blocked by process 3015.
Process 3015 waits for ShareLock on transaction 3017010057; blocked by process 2975.
SQL: insert into as_sessionsi
(revision_id,object_type,creation_user,creation_date, creation_ip, title, description, item_id, mime_type )
values('25620811','as_sessions','24266584',NULL,
'10.0.0.20','24266584-25620119-1ba075ea-2d08-4f81-b35f-2b8baca8d210',NULL, '25620807', NULL )


Inserting a item_data revision:

ERROR: deadlock detected
DETAIL: Process 2975 waits for ShareLock on transaction 3017009950; blocked by process 3015.
Process 3015 waits for ShareLock on transaction 3017010057; blocked by process 2975.
SQL: insert into as_sessionsi
(revision_id, object_type,creation_user, creation_date, creation_ip,title, description, item_id, mime_type )
values ('25620811', 'as_sessions', '24266584', NULL, '10.0.0.20', '24266584-25620119-1ba075ea-2d08-4f81-b35f-2b8baca8d210', NULL, '25620807', NULL )


and all of the above were from the same day (last Saturday).

As many people had said, I don't know why a simple insert could cause a deadlock, I wonder if it being an insert to a materialized view could be related, or if indexes like these:

"as_item_data_pk2" btree (session_id, section_id, as_item_id)
"as_item_data_pk3" btree (as_item_id, section_id, session_id)

could affect a DML operation performance. Some help from PG experts would be really appreciated 😊

I agree on the possibility of the Assessment package misusing the CR, because everything related to the CR (File-Storage, Evaluation, LORS) was working great here until Assessment was installed.