Hi everybody!
first of all, I want to welcome (again) Artem, that agreed to donate some
of his time to help us get back up to speed.
In the last couple of week we finalized three things:
1. a refactoring and speedup of the *functional tests* (from submit-wait
for each testcase, to submit everything and wait for everything); this was
mainly done to allow a proper stresstest for ES;
2. the *server-side pagination* for submissions, which prevent your
browser from committing suicide when looking at a contest with thousands of
submissions;
3. moving the *localization files* from the "additional data" section of
our setup to their proper package (another small step towards being more
pythonic also in the setup phase).
We have also a few more changes in flight, mostly the introduction of
*teams* as a concept in CMS (thanks William!), to make it easier to show
them in RWS, and some initial effect of my *experiments with ES*
performances.
***
Speaking of which, I obtained good result with a simple strategy composed
of two steps:
1. avoid all checks for "is this operation really needed" - despite
being really simple, the act of firing up an alchemy session is very
computationally expensive (possibly moving them to raw SQL?);
2. combine the results coming from different workers before sending them
to the database, in particular combining all results from the same
submission.
I still have to do some tests on where are the bottlenecks after doing
these two changes.
***
And finally, *Java*. We got an additional reminder that a proper Java
support is really required, and we will merge the IOI Java branch soon. The
real deal, though, and on which we did not start working on yet, will be to
abstract away all the code that deals with specific languages and provide
it back as language-specific plugins. As always, contributions are very
welcome!
See you in a couple of weeks!
-- Ste
