Some tasks in admin course take too long

[Alex-Jordan]

When I upgraded Runestone's hosting server to 2.19, I reached the stage where I needed to upgrade the courses. It identified all ~100 courses as needing to be upgraded. I clicked to make it so. I knew this would take a while. The Firefox tab had its animation going letting me know the page was loading/waiting for a reply. After a long time though, the page turned to this:

I went back into the admin course and found that the first several dozen courses had been upgraded, and that is as far as it got. Somehow it took so long, that my "secure connection failed" as it says in the picture. And the upgrade process halted. I proceeded to upgrade the courses in batches of roughly a dozen at a time

Later, I went to make a new admin course with a new more secure course name. At the end of that process, I would like to archive the old admin course. Well, there is a lot in there. Perhaps a thousand course archives in the archives folder, and some of those archives themselves are large files. The same thing happened with "secure connection failed". And it is not like the archive process continued running in the background even though my "secure connection failed"; there was no archive created.

So I find that I cannot archive the old "admin" course from the new admin course. Also I don't see a script for doing this in bin.

I don't know how to think about all this. I think I would want to understand the fundamentals of why the "secure connection failed" if too much time passes.

[drgrice1]

Try adding Enivronment="MOJO_INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT=3600" to your conf/webwork2.service file. This will set the inactivity timeout to one hour. The default value is 30 seconds. After changing the file run sudo systemctl daemon-reload, and then sudo systemctl reload webwork2.

This is something that we need to work on in general. Any process that could possibly take an inordinate amount of time like this should be done in a job queue process instead of trying to accomplish it directly in a request. This is how any good system does it. A request should never take this long to respond.

[Alex-Jordan]

I haven't tried your suggestion, which sounds like it would work. Instead I decided I do not need to keep the "admin" course's archives folder, since I already copied all those course archives into the new admin course's archives folder. It's over 3G worth of file content in those course archives, and with that gone I could archive the old "admin" course.

The larger issue remains, and your suggestion to use the job queue is of course the right thing to do.

[Alex-Jordan]

Er, actually 8.5G because I have archives from an older server in a different folder too.