Options Manager -- Debugging and Benchmarking

These options are set from the Other tab of the Options Manager interface.

The following features are intended for advanced board administrators who have a specific reason to use them. These reasons may include the desire to monitor all activities of a particular user or the wish to track the internal workings of the Discus software to make code efficiency improvements.

Using either the debugging or performance monitoring (benchmarking) features will slow down the operation of CGI scripts for all users. As such, DiscusWare again recommends that these options be used only by advanced administrators who thoroughly understand them and have a very good reason to use them.

• User-based debugging: If checked, Discus will maintain a record of all input and output screens for users that you specify. The next time you log in to administration as the board administrator, a "Debugging" link will appear in the administration main menu, which will allow you to view the input data and output screens of all users whose activity you are tracking.

  To use debugging, you must enter at least one username to track. Enter the username in the box and save the options, which will cause that username to appear in a box of its own and a new blank box to appear for future input.

  To end tracking of activity by a particular username, simply delete that username from the box entirely and save your options. The box that contained the deleted username will disappear when the screen refreshes.

• Performance monitoring: This will create a detailed log of most file reads and writes, template generations, and so on, to assist the reader in tracking exactly what the Discus program is doing. This tool is used by DiscusWare developers to optimize performance. For example, if it is noticed that a particular procedure results in the same file being read 20 times, the developers will rewrite the code to read the file once and cache the results. This tool has three possible settings:

  • Disabled: No performance monitoring will be performed. This is the default setting and is recommended for optimal performance. If you do not intend to analyze the performance log, there is no reason to slow down the operation of your board by having the board write a performance log.

  • Enabled in overwrite mode: The performance log will be kept, started from scratch upon each access. This is useful for tracing specific actions on a board where you, the administrator, are the only one with access. The performance log is stored as "performance.txt" in the "data" subdirectory.

  • Enabled in append mode: Each access to a Discus CGI script will be recorded in the performance log, with the log growing to record this data. The performance log is stored as "performance.txt" in the "data" subdirectory. WARNING! If you select this option, the performance log will become very big, especially if you have an active board. The performance log can easily swell to several hundred megabytes in just a single day. Use this option with extreme caution!

  Note: The performance log function will be disabled automatically if you have enabled the Discus Task Manager.