What’s on our mind: Giving overdues reports in Koha a boost

For Koha systems with large numbers of overdues, the ‘Overdues’ and ‘Overdues with fines’ reports could be painfully slow to load. Following multiple reports of this, bug 41903 was opened to try and convert these reports to using a server-side paginated approach, rather than loading all overdues at once and then handling the table pagination in the UI.

Firstly, we needed to test out just how resource intensive this report could be to ensure that a substantial performance improvement was being achieved once the new implementation was ready. Using a data insertion script, 4000 overdues were added into a test Koha environment and tests were run to work out how long the page was taking to achieve its largest contentful paint. A largest contentful paint refers to how long the page takes to display the largest image, text block or video visible within the viewport – in this case that is the table containing the overdues. With 4000 overdues in the system, the overdues report was taking nearly 20 seconds to achieve LCP!