Re: Outreachy: Timeline tasks

[Luciana Lima Brito <lubrito@posteo.net>]

On Sat, 01 May 2021 20:07:56 +0100
Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> wrote:

> Luciana Lima Brito <lubrito@posteo.net> writes:
> 
> > On Sat, 01 May 2021 09:16:08 +0100
> > Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> wrote:
> >  
> >> Currently the timing of various sections of the process includes
> >> timing smaller sections, and that may complicate reading the chart,
> >> since it won't convey which timed sections include other timed
> >> sections. Does that make sense?  
> >
> > Yes, I understand. But just to make sure, you say that the actions
> > we see in the logs are actually subsections of a bigger process? The
> > problem here would be to clearly mark in the code actions of a same
> > process. I'll take this into account on my planning.  
> 
> Take the lint warnings for example, currently the time to fetch all
> lint warnings is timed, but the usage of each individual linter is
> timed. Both bits of information are helpful.

OK.
 
> > For that I propose to build 2 charts, one of the
> > macro view, what we call "overview first", showing the
> > sections(processes) and their whole time taken. This way we could
> > just see what we were aiming for, which is to identify slowness.
> > The second chart would be what we call "details on demand", in
> > which we could have the subsections(actions) being shown. To differ
> > to which section(process) they are bound, we could use two
> > meaningless alternating colours (just to group the subsections of a
> > section), and they would follow the same order as the first chart.
> >
> > The use of alternating colours could be applied to both charts in
> > order to make clear the equivalence. Both charts should appear at
> > the same time, one above the other, to ease comparison.  
> 
> That sounds better, although I think a timeline, similar to what the
> systemd-analyze example uses [1] might be a more natural
> representation of the data, colour could then be used to represent
> relatively how long each part takes.
> 
> 1: https://lizards.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/plot001.gif

Here I have two observations to debate:
1 - Is the starting and ending time of each process an important
information to determine its slowness? If this information is not
necessary, maybe we should avoid the timeline, in order to make the
chart cleaner. A timeline could impair the comparisons of bars, so I
would recommend simple bar charts.

2 - About the colours to represent how long each part takes, I don't
know if I get it right. Do you mean to have one colour for slow parts
and other colour to normal parts? 

Anyway, I think all this can be further discussed while the work is in
progress.

> > I'll add this to the plan and to the final application, ok?  
> 
> Yep.

-- 
Best Regards,

Luciana Lima Brito
MSc. in Computer Science