Venue: Breakaway 2

Initial Thoughts

• Creating a 2-million patient test data set to stress test OpenMRS
• Having an OpenMRS release focused solely on performance improvement
• How many data clerks & managers can access the system at once
• Using replication to offload reporting from the "operational" system
• Optimizing Tomcat configuration
• Look at notes from How to Start an Implementation

Goals

• How well is OpenMRS currently performing?
• What are hardware requirements?
  • For people using low-power systems, how far can they go?
• How much bandwidth is needed to do data entry via the internet?
• Can OpenMRS have a chance at scaling?
• How do you optimize MySQL configuration?
• How is OpenMRS' performance affected by different databases (e.g., SQL Server 2008)?
• What global properties exist for performance tuning?

Notes

Current performance

• With large implementations, it can take 15 seconds or more to find a patient and 30-60 seconds to load the patient dashboard
• Pentium 4 w/ 256 MB was slow managing 700,00 patients

• What are hardware requirements?
  • Most systems are using at least 4 GB of RAM, some on a server and others on a desktop

• Performance Testing
  • Saptarshi blogged about this
  • Glassfish may be more scalable than Tomcat

• What Settings (formerly Global Properties from 1.9 downwards) exist for performance tuning?
  • patient.identifierPrefix - change from % to blank (empty)
  • patient.identifierRegex - change from % to blank (empty)
  • patient.identifierSuffix - change from % to blank (empty)
  • patient.searchMaxResults - set to maximum matches you think a person would be willing to search through (e.g., 100 or 1000)

Are we over-AJAXed?

• • Could we make the search delay duration a global property? And make AJAX real-time patient search optional via Setting (formerly Global Property from 1.9 downwards)?

How many users of the system

• AMPATH has ~25 data entry users working concurrently
• Even 6 active users can be slowed if the same system is being used for reporting (cohort builder or data exports)

• Avoiding power outage issues
  • ExtraDB is an alternative to InnoDB that handles crashes better and performs better

TODO

• Make a ticket for Fix the patient search widget faster
  • Make AJAX real-time search optional & delay time settable via Settings (formerly Global Properties from 1.9 downwards)
  • Avoid downloading all patients
• Fix the patient dashboard
  • Lazy loading of data