[H-GEN] Request Tracker question

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Byron Ellacott wrote:

> We here at APNIC use RT2.  As far as I know, we're the largest user of
> RT by ticket volume; we have over 600,000 tickets in the system at the

Interesting.  No RT installation I've used has gone over a few thousand
tickets (at least while I was administering it).

> RT2 does not scale to this size well.  We had to disable certain queries

At what point would you say the slowdown became significant?

> because they were causing massive joins and tying MySQL up for tens of
> minutes at a time.  We also had to pace ticket injection, because ticket
> creation is a lengthy and heavy weight process, and a constant trickle
> of them interferes with UI interaction.

What about clustering MySQL and having ticket creation on a different box
to the one the UI is touching?

> Another thing to be wary of is that RT2 has a complete lack of
> protection against multiple submits and careless reloads.  It's quite
> easy to hit "reload" on a ticket display page, dismiss the "Resubmit
> POST" dialog out of hand, and discover you've sent an email twice, or
> created two tickets instead of one.

Yes I've done this.  Fortunately (at least as far as job creation goes) it
is pretty easy to deal with.  Just reject the job or merge it or whatever
the policy calls for.

> (We fixed that locally, but our fix causes its own problems, and a
> better fix should be forthcoming.)

Cool.

> I don't know how much of this RT3 solves, but our evaluation suggested
> that RT3 would gain us extraordinarily little, while requiring our
> userbase to be retrained to a new UI and the new concepts in RT3.

I don't find the UI so different actually.  It has changed a bit between
RT3.0 and RT3.2 though.  I found this a bit annoying.

I don't like the assumption that everyone who is going to write additonal
modules for RT3 is going to do it in perl and I'm looking at doing a set
of functions for interacting with RT3 in PHP.  I'll submit this as to
their contrib area.

I don't consider any of these points to be huge problems though.  We're
still very happy with RT3.

>From what I've seen the RT3 code seems much cleaner than the RT2 code too.

> > I have some regular clients and want to store their details. When
> > creating a new ticket I want to be able to select them and have their
> > details appear as part of the ticket.
>
> I don't believe RT does this.  We've changed our ticket display page
> somewhat, so it might have originally, and it can almost certainly be
> modified to do so now.

The "requestor" email address provides a link to the client details.  It
should not be hard to glue something in bring up the relevant details but
yes this does not happen as it is.  I may have misunderstood what Harry
was asking before replying yesterday.

Cheers,
	Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc.
Senior Technical Consultant, OpenTrend Solutions Ltd.
Phone: 416-669-3073, Email: rbrockway at opentrend.net, http://www.opentrend.net
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