This patch saves 1600 context lookups on a 1600 course category. rcache
does help a bit with small categories, but on large setups, this is
not sustainable.
And it's not needed either. We have the data right at our fingertips.
Just get it when it's cheap...
Introducing get_context_users_bycap() which gets the data in
2 DB queries, takes around 10ms on my laptop, and returns
the records with a nice context property attached.
Note Note Note: right now, some user recs do not have a context
associated, so are _not_ returned. So this awaits Matt's fix
to contexts maintenance to be 100% accurate...
A walkthrough of course-login-as functionality shows that is
Just Works, except that get_my_courses() was showing all the
courses. So we fix it.
And cleanup load_all_capabilities() - things just work
transparently.
This is *the* scary commit. No more scaffolding, no more
training wheels. Remove the legacy has_capabilty_old() and
several supporting functions.
has_capability_old()
capability_search()
is_parent_context()
roles_context_cmp()
load_user_capability()
capability_prohibits()
I've grepped far and wide. Noone else uses the supporting
functions anywhere in-the-known-universe. If I could not
find it, it does not exist.
[Thankful that cvs/git/whatever will hold on to them
if I end up having to regret this.]
This patch introduces a new global $ACCESS that will cache
accessdata (our ra/rdef array) for users that are _not_ the
logged in user.
Most of the time it will be empty (luckily).
Each new user we have to get "in" costs us 3 or 4 cheap
dbqueries at the moment, so it is not that bad.
has_capability() now calls load_user_accessdata() if the
call is for a non-logged-user. So $ACCESS is autopopulated
transparently.
This also means that has_capability no longer calls
has_capability_old(). Yay!
With this patch, user/view.php for looking at a user in a course...
Before: 62 dbqueries, 10.3MB, 0.7s
After: 49 dbqueries, 8.5MB, 0.3s
I had dropped support for multi-enrolments on the same context.
Oops!
This patch reinstates it, changing the semantics of the 'ra'
array leaves from an int to an array of ints.
So no instead of
$USER->access['ra']['/1/12/543'] = 5
we have
$USER->access['ra']['/1/12/543'] = array(5)
the functions that build the array, and the array walkers have
been updated. This touches...
Writing RAs
load_all_capabilities()
get_user_access_sitewide()
get_user_access_bycontext()
Reading RAs
has_cap_fromsess()
aggr_roles_fromsess()
Thanks to Matt Clarkson for mentioning multi-enrolments!
With this commit we now have very fast support for
roleswitching, based on $sess[rsw] entries.
And a bit of phpdoc. This is function, and the
datastructure it walks, is the heart of of it.
First stage of role_switch() rewrite - role_switch() sets up
a rsw entry in $USER->access, and makes sure we have the
appropriate role definitions in rdef.
That is where get_role_access_bycontext() comes into play -
gets all the rdef entries in one cheap sql query.
... though there may be many of them...
TODO:
- fix callers of role_switch()
- teach has_cap_fromsess() to read the rsw entries
Draft - use for the course participants list page
Uses 1 DB query (cheap too - 2~7ms).
TODO:
- implement additional where clauses
- sorting
- get course participants list to use it!
returns a users array, both sorted _and_ keyed
on id (as get_my_courses() does)
as a bonus, every user record comes with its own
personal context, as our callers need it straight away
{save 1 dbquery per user! yay!}
- Field handling moves back to get_my_courses() and now we have
almost all the fields that the old get_my_courses() did
(except for summary, which is *huge*) so get_my_courses() asks
for a lot of fields, but the get_user_courses_bycap() defaults
are _much_ leaner now.
I think this makes sense ;-)
- get_my_courses() now caches the course ids for the currently logged in
user in $USER->mycourses -- as a _string_. This is magnitudes more efficient
than having it as an array.
The cache makes a difference, but it's not very visible on
normal pageloads (with my courses block, for example).
However, over 100 iterations, for a user with 50 enrolments in a site
with 6K courses, we go from 4.3s to 0.6s. And the DB queries are *cheap*.
$tt = microtime(true);
for($n=0;$n<100;$n++) {
get_my_courses($USER->id, 'sortorder ASC');
}
error_log("took " . (microtime(true) - $tt));
get_user_courses_bycap() replaces get_courses_bycap_fromsess().
Using a combination of in-DB enrolments and in-session capability
checks, we narrow down the courses we fetch from the DB for checking.
This patch adds a small DB query, and has has a moderate impact on
the timings observable on my laptop (~300ms?), but reduces
*significantly* the bandwidth used, which in cluster environments
with frontends separate from backends has a serious impact.
get_my_courses() goes from a bazillion queries (500 in some sample
cases) to 1 for the logged-in user, and 4 for a non-logged-in user.
One of those queries brings a *lot* of data across (all rows from
mdl_course) so there is room for serious optimisation.
However, this clocks at ~300 ms on my laptop, costly, but not
the end of the world. If your PHP-DB link has bandwidth probs
it might be a problem.
A few important changes to get_my_courses()
- (Compat ALERT!) the default fields are less than before --
(will be followed by patches that fix the callers!) our defaults
had grown to quite a bit because of the crazy caching scheme it had
- the $fields parameter is to name _additional_ fields you need, and
ideally wants them passed as an array. Will cope with old-style
strings too.
- the returned courses have an extra property "context" that is
a fully valid context object, so if the caller needs to perform
further accesslib checks, we save a query per course down the road
The work is done in the newfangled get_courses_bycap_fromsess()
which is brute-force but fast. I'm sure we can optimise the common
cases a lot in it if we try. It'd be worthwhile to
- reduce the rows we grab - that's really boneheaded
- if we copy and tweak the logic of has_cap_fromsess() in it
it can be made even faster
The main thing here is that overrides in subcontexts are
now read correctly (and still cheaply) into the access array.
Also
- introducing aggr_roles_fromsess() with gives you a list of
the relevant roles that affect the user in this context
- we clear out $USER->access on login/logout
- get_user_access_bycontext() gets a few optimisations too...
Changes around load_user_capability() and has_capability() to make
the default role fallbacks and guest/nonloggedin roles work.
This commit also introduces the concept of having a magic
context next to the root context in $USER->access[ra], as
$USER->access[ra][/1] = 1 (admin roleid)
$USER->access[ra][/1:def] = 7 (loggedinuser roleid)
and has_cap_fromsess() now checks for that magic context
as well.
With this commit, the new has_capability works for the logged
in user correctly.
- load_all_capabilities() no longer calls load_user_capability()!
6K dbqueries less on login... ;-)
- When delving into a context we haven't loaded yet, we call
get_user_access_bycontext()
- Introduce: get_user_access_bycontext()
- Several fixes in get_user_access_sitewide()
(renamed from get_user_sitewide_access())
- Fixes in has_cap_fromsess()
- Introduce access_insess() to check if we have to call
get_user_access_bycontext() for the context
- has_capability() renamed has_capability_old() and we fallback
when we cannot answer the question
- has_capability() works great for the course-and-above contexts
for the logged in user - does not touch the DB
- works based on $USER->access which has a pretty compact view
of the user's access rights...
TODO:
- deal with contexts below the course - here we need to
trigger the role-assignment and role-defs load when needed
- deal with "other" contexts that hang from the system context
- deal with global roleswitch, local roleswitch
This function carefully fetches all the data needed to
handle site/category/course access for a given user
as cheaply as possible.
It currently takes 3 db queries.
* All updates to user.lastaccess and user_lastaccess.timeaccess are paced to
60s of the last update on the same record -- this should reduce the heat
on those tables.
* Updates/inserts to user_lastaccess are down with raw SQL to avoid costly
schema lookups on every request.
With this patch we preload the child contexts for the course
and hold on to them. This means that in one DB query we have all the contexts
we are going to need.
The checks for user_allowed_editing() move from weblib:update_icon() to
user_allowed_editing(), where we cache the result, and in the process save
50% of the cap checks by testing separately blocks from modules (doh!).
Still, the cap checks here are very inefficient...
With the last 3 patches, a course page with default blocks and 9 modinstances
goes from 157 to 86 db queries when logged in as a non-editing user (guest,
student). As admin it drops from 88 to 81.
Conflicts:
lib/pagelib.php
Access control for the course icon display should happen
at the page level, as we'll need to ask "can edit?" quite
a few times in the page.
The fact that this is weblib should be a good hint that
functions that print html should not be doing access control...
Using context.path, now get_child_contexts...
- always takes 1 query
- populated the context_cache
- returns full records
- when called with an category, it won't
recurse into the children of courses
Also
- All callers in accesslib changed to the new
calling convention
A normal course page with a std blocks and a few
activities sees around 100 queries less with this patch.
Note: this commit is slightly different on HEAD/19 and on
MOODLE_18_STABLE, as groups-related tables have changed.
Issue:
Teachers can edit grader report preferences (including switches for quickgrading and
quickfeedback), but do not have access to the "Turn editing on/off" button, so they
can't do quickgrading.
Solutions:
1.Decouple the quickgrading and quickfeedback modes from the editing mode,
and turn them on/off through the preferences page. New capability: moodle/grade:edit
* preferences: don't show quickgrading if no capability grade:edit
* If quickgrading is switched off as a preference and user doesn't have manage cap, show edit icons around grades when in editing mode
