Re: [WWdevel] jsMath v2.0 and WeBWorK

[Davide P.C. <dp...@un...>]

> I did some timing tests for 10,000 1024 byte binary files containing 
> random data.

Thanks for the hard data.

> It looks like the main bottleneck is remote checkouts. Checking out to 
> my machine took 15m43s, but after replacing the small files with a 
> tarball the same checkout only took 1m26s.
>
> Updates and commits don't seem to be a problem, since CVS only 
> consults the repository for files that have updated timestamps. Remote 
> update of the a small files working directory took 9.7 seconds, 
> compared to 1.5 seconds for a tarball working directory. (This is with 
> no updates to be made.)

I was concerned about the update times, but these are not as bad as I 
had thought they would be.  On the other hand, there are about 20,000 
files for the jsMath image fonts, not 10,000, so the times will be 
longer.  I think the checkout times make this prohibitive, and the 
extra work involved in unpacking the file is probably worth it.

> On Aug 16, 2005, at 11:20, John Jones wrote:
>
>> Personally, I would favor ease of installation over saving on cvs 
>> data.  A way of doing both would be to have it as a single tar 
>> archive, and let webwork deal with it.  When it looks for the images, 
>> if they don't exist it looks for the image archive file.  If that 
>> exists, webwork untars it automatically.  I think the path to tar is 
>> already in global.conf.
>
> This would certainly be convenient for the administrator, but I'm not 
> sure it would be worth it. Currently, static files are served by 
> Apache directly, without WW's involvement. Involving WeBWorK in the 
> delivery of static files could only be bad for speed.

I'm not sure I think it's worth it, either.  Remember that jsMath runs 
in the browser, not the server, and so it will not be able to check if 
the archive has been unpacked.  It would be possible for Problem.pm, 
ProblemSet.pm and the library browser to check if the fonts have been 
unpacked when jsMath mode is selected, but it seems like unnecessary 
overhead to me.  The tar file will only need to be unpacked once, so 
I'd hate to have every invocation of a WW problem require a file-system 
check for the jsMath fonts.

> I guess right now I'd go for extracting the tarball manually.

That is my inclination as well.  Unless I hear additional dissent, I'll 
go ahead and do that.  John, if you still have a strong preference for 
individual files, let me know.

Davide