the performance stats for each upload or download are undiscoverable

[zooko]

A volunteergrid2 user has been struggling for days to understand why uploads are so slow. It took at least a couple of days before he discovered the Recent Uploads Downloads page, and then it took another day after that before he discovered the actual results associated with each upload/download! So those stats are very hard to find. This isn't the first time I've seen this. I think it is the third time I've seen users wondering about performance, searching for information about it, and not finding those pages.

[zooko]

I added the tag ostrom because as soon as the user found the page with the data, he immediately asked the owner of one of the servers on the volunteergrid2 why that guy's server was taking more than 1 second to respond to requests. This sort of transparency/visibility is necessary for Ostromish organization (Ostrom principle #4: "Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators").

[zooko]

This just happened again: stercor on IRC had seen my ​post to tahoe-dev that mentioned statistics and recent-uploads-and-downloads and asked me how I had gotten each of those. This sort of thing has happened with many other people before: they ask me where to find such numbers.

It's funny how that data is really well hidden even though it is linked directly from the welcome page. I wonder why people can't find it. Maybe nobody ever looks at the welcome page?

Help! We need contributions from people with design skills!

[drewp]

What would people think if the 'Recent Uploads and Downloads' link was joined by a small, live-updating status display summarizing that page? If the welcome page is truly talking to localhost, it may be cheap enough to do an ajax request, say, every 2 seconds [1]. The summary would show progress bars on currently-running operations, and maybe it would include finished ones for a little while just so you don't do a quick operation and see nothing at all. Any click for more detail would go to the current RUaD page.

[1] requestAnimationFrame is a hot new technique that can be used to make the request every 2 seconds *as long as that part of the page is visible to the user*.

[zooko]

drewp: +1 ! Let's try it! Of course, a lot of people strongly want to retain Javascript-free access to all data, so we'll be careful not to make Javascript required to use the WUI...

[zooko]

#1713 appears to have fixed the main issue: "Recent Uploads and Downloads page is undiscoverable".

However, I would still be very keen on drewp's suggestion of a mini-live-view-thingie on the front page...

I guess I'll open a new ticket for that...

Okay, opened #1912.

[daira]

I strongly prefer pages that I often have open for a long time not to do any JavaScript polling.

[zooko]

Okay, it turns out that this was not fixed. This patch made the Recent Uploads Downloads page discoverable, but did not make the performance stats and visualization discoverable, as per #1962.

[zooko]

Tony: want to work on this?

[daira]

Wait, the "Recent and Active Operations" page is not the same as the performance stats pages for each operation. The former is linked fairly prominently from the Welcome page, but getting to the latter requires:

• that the know the performance stats pages exist;
• that you know to look for them via the Recent and Active Operations page (as opposed to, say, the Operational Statistics page);
• that the link in the Status field for each operation goes to its performance stats page (which is far from obvious, because the link text will be "Finished", or some other word that describes a status and has nothing to do with performance).