Blogs tagged "Architecture"

The 4.7.24 release is scheduled for the first Wednesday of September. Ordinarily, there would be an announcement about the release-candidate (RC) in mid-August, but we're doing something a bit different this time around -- extending the RC to a full month, which mean the RC is available now at http://download.civicrm.org/latest. Testing out the RC is a great way to ensure that your systems will continue to work in the next release. Let me talk about how this change helps.

The Background

Quality-control for a new release is a team sport. It relies on reporters and developers performing thoughtful analysis when they identify a problem or improvement. It relies on developers writing code which anticipates errors, improves test-coverage, and follows recognizable conventions. It relies on infrastructure running automated tests. It relies on reviewers understanding the problem-domain and questioning assumptions. It...

At the CiviCons and developer meetings this year, we've had several conversations about release strategy. The topic is a bit abstract -- touching on a web of interrelated issues of technology and scheduling and business-process. I've been searching for a way to explain this topic to people who don't eat and breathe code in CiviCRM's git repos -- an analysis which is a bit simpler and more transcendent.

The best analysis predates us by a few years -- Will Durant attributed the idea to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, paraphrasing:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

All of us -- users, developers, administrators, core, contributors -- want excellence in CiviCRM. Does that mean we need one grand release to prove our excellence? No, excellence merely means that we review every patch thoughtfully. Excellence means that we have mastery over our use-cases, and that we...

To ensure that CiviCRM continues to work with standard, contemporary PHP hosting platforms, a future version may make a subtle change in hosting requirements. We expect this to be mostly seamless; however, we're looking for administrators responsible for sites running a recent CiviCRM (e.g. v4.7+) to spend a few minutes to help ensure a smooth transition.

Q: I'm not too fluent in geek-speak. What should I do?

Forward this to whoever manages your server. If you work with a CiviCRM partner, they may be thinking of you already.

Q: I am fluent in geek-speak. What should I do?

Determine if your web server has the PHP extension mysqli installed. Any of these will tell you:

• Use the server's command-line:
  • Run "php -r 'echo extension_loaded("mysqli") ? "loaded\n" : "missing\n";'".
  • It should display "loaded".
• ...

Busy sites have often encountered problems with deadlocks on the group contact cache. There were no less that 3 different code contributions to mitigate this problem put up for 4.7.8 and a number of other discussions have been going on in JIRA.

Merged into 4.7.8 are some improvements which we hope will mitigate this problem for those sites that experience it. JIRA is the primary source of information on this, however I wanted to share a brief overview.

The focus of the fix so far has been very much on deadlocks when clearing the contact cache. The reason being that these have been causing the most havoc. In analysing the problem it turned out that when someone edits pretty much anything the code looks for stale groups & tries to flush the cache. Depending on the size of the cache that can take a few seconds and it doesn't update the cache last flushed date until afterwards. So if the...