[kepler-dev] Problem with very slow kepler startup

[Dan Higgins]

Hi All,

    Several people had recently noticed that Kepler seems to take a very 
long time to startup (worse than before). I took a look at this and 
think I have  substantially reduced startup time!

    To check my fix, you will need to checkout (or update) kepler with 
the -P switch (to prune empty directories) and remove your old .kepler 
directory (in your home).

    What I did was simply remove $KEPLER/src/actors/GetTaxa/. This will 
remove the GetTaxa actor from the actor tree. I put it there originally. 
This actor was written by the SEEK Taxon group as an example of using 
the SEEK Taxon server. However, the code currently calls the server in 
the class startup code! This code is executed when the actor tree is 
built. I suspect that the server recently went 'down', causing the 
kepler startup to wait for server timeout.

    In any case, removing this actor from the tree caused Kepler startup 
time to drop from about 75 seconds to 25 seconds on my machine!

    Incidently, the actor removed is only used in a single test workflow.

Dan Higgins
NCEAS