[Erp5-dev] activities are not being fired at all

[Pelletier Vincent]

Le Mercredi 31 Octobre 2007 12:36, Jacek Medrzycki a écrit :
> We have noticed that on our site (at revision 27264) activities are not
> being invoked. All activities are in state -1. When invoked by hand,
> hovewer, they execute with no errors.

Those activities might be waiting for a tag to disapear from activity list.
For example, an activity waiing for a reindex to be finished on a given 
object.

Activity dependencies (ie, waiting for a tag or a method_id) are computed at 
distribution time, which would explain the presence of activities with -1 as 
processing_node. Invoking them bypasses the dependency check. Previously, it 
was done at execution time, which caused dependency check to happen multiple 
time on messages on activty processing nodes instead of actualy executing 
activities. Now, the extra work is done on the distributing node which has 
"nothing else" to do.

This implementation has been measured as much more efficient in cases like 
reindexing a complete site, but Your Mileage May Vary depending on how 
activities are created.

Sometimes, when activities fail and are being waited for the result looks like 
complete activity freeze. This _is_ a feature.

What you might encounter though is a distribution inneficiency when there are 
many activities waiting on others. In pathologic cases, distributing node can 
takes tens of seconds to find an electible activity, distribute it, and 
searches for the next to distrbute... Sadly, I see no easy way out of this. 
One possibility is to control activity generation to avoid creating too many 
activities at once, by creating an activity bundle when the previous one is 
finished processing (or the number of remaining activities drops below a 
certain amount to avoid activity engine starvation... hint: countMessage).

-- 
Vincent Pelletier