Proposed Features for Launchpad Bugs 3.0 - call for help!

[Jonathan Marsden]

Christian Robottom Reis wrote:

> In reality [performance] was an overall goal, and one which we did 
> pursue with a
> vengeance. The number of timeouts dropped to under 10 a day (!!) for the
> whole site over the 3.0 release, and dozens of pages which issues O(n)
> queries were fixed.

Cool!  Sincere thanks for the info.  That wasn't at all evident from the 
feature list that was presented here (the one that started this discussion).

Is there a place where LP performance issues are measured and displayed, 
online, for public view?  Maybe a comparison of the previous codebase(s) 
vs. the 3.0 codebase on several representative queries could be graphed, 
or something?  Then performance goals for the next version could be 
discussed, and added, with some defined metrics and history to base them on?

> I do get the message: it's still not fast enough;
> however that does not mean that we haven't worked hard at improving it.

OK.  All I had to go on was my personal (recent) experience with LP, and 
the list of proposed features that started this discussion.  Sounds like 
I may have unwittingly missed reading about the recent performance 
improvements ... where *should* I have read about them?  Can you provide 
a URL?

>> Indeed. Was the question "Should the next release of LP be primarily
>> about new features, or about performance, or about bug fixes?" seriously
>> addressed early in the development cycle of LP 3.0?
>
> It /is/ being addressed as we speak, and that's one of the reasons this
> conversation is important to me.

Great!  THANKYOU!  The list of features offered did not give me that 
impression, or I misunderstood it, or both.  Perhaps the LP team would 
get more encouraging responses if others could "see" that this kind of 
discussion is indeed happening?  Is there a way to make it more visible?

> On the other hand, the feedback I get,
> despite me asking otherwise, doesn't really give me much to work on --

I can't resist: consistency, performance, and bug fixes: that's really 
rather a *lot* to work on, if you ask me :-)

> there is too much talking down our process, where what I am looking for
> is more encouraging feedback.

Apologies if I've depressed or offended anyone by expressing an honest 
opinion.  That wasn't my intent at all!  As I said at the start of my 
earlier post, I'm just a newcomer... so do ignore me if I am just a 
negative drag on LP!

Sometimes in project development, the views of a newcomer, a relative 
outsider, can help provide a perspective that the insiders, oldtimers 
and developers with solid technical knowledge of internal details, etc. 
may not themselves have.  That is the spirit in which I posted.  I *am* 
encouraged that this level of discussion is happening, which it didn't 
initially appear to be, based on the original feature list and request 
made on this mailing list.

I suspect that you'd get more useful feedback about LP if you asked this 
community the kind of more general questions about LP that I have tried 
to raise, rather than (only) presenting a list of features to 
prioritize.  Whether that feedback would be encouraging or not... that's 
a rather different question, and the answer may depend on what you 
define as encouraging.  In one sense, just the fact that people respond 
at all, taking the time to provide feedback, could be encouraging to the 
LP team -- it means that LP is a software product that is important to 
people!

Thanks for listening,

Jonathan