Odoo at last!¶

After several months, we have finally moved from OpenERP to Odoo. It took several rounds of testing, finding bugs and incompatibilities in our own modules and fixing them.

A summary of the process¶

The OpenUpgrade project proved to be very complete for us –it had almost everything we needed:

The Accounting and Project modules were done.
The CRM module was not yet integrated into the mainstream repository but a fork by Stefan Rijnhart had a branch that proved very complete for our needs.

We began by merging Stefan’s branch into our own clone of the repository. We came into a small issue and fixed it. Afterwards, some of our recurrent events were missing the timezone and the migration failed. For that we created the branch 8.0-valid-rrules and it did the job after a couple of tweeks.

The branch we actually used for the migration is merchise-8.0. It includes several commits we had to make for our customs addons to work. Those commits are probably too local to be merged back into the upstream. However, we have published them should anyone finds them useful.

The menu decomposition¶

The biggest issue we’ve encountered so far is that after several hours of operation all the menus stopped working: You clicked the “Leads” menu item and you got, say, the list of Many2Many fields. (???!!!)

A first inspection showed that all menu items in the HTML were somehow related to the same action id. Quickly, we truncated the ir_ui_menu table and its associated ir_model_data rows, upgraded the DB and all menus came to life once more.

The day after, the same problem happened. Deeper inspection of both the code and the DB showed the problem lied in the ir_values table. That table relates menu items with actions. The rows containing this relation showed nonsense: almost all the menu items were related to “res_partner,20”. And in the UI this was interpreted to be pointing to the action with id 20.

Comparing the table before and after the upgrade showed no problem there. So this issue had appeared after the migration itself.

Our previous method of truncating ir_ui_menu didn’t fix this issue cause the ir_values rows remained there crippling over and over again. Besides, truncating ir_ui_menu had the unintentional, bad side-effect of removing every Mail list in our DB.

We’re still on the track about how the ir.values were messed up in the first place.

The magical 6 tabs¶

Our users started to report slowness after a couple of hours of working. First, we noticed that the call to load_needaction was taking too long and find out this call asked for too much it did not need, we provided a fix and some loose benchmarks. Though this patch needs to be completed, the slowness was solved… for a moment.

Some users kept reporting the Odoo interface was freezing all the time, even inviting them to go out and drink a cup of coffee… But other users were happy about it after the patch. Closer inspection showed many of the AJAX calls were blocking waiting for a socket to be available.

It turned out these users had created a habit of opening several tabs when they worked with OpenERP. They kept this kind of behavior, but a couple of facts worked against them:

We have installed the Odoo chat. Many of our users are geographically spread, the chat provided an instant and cheaper communication path.

This feature was, by far, one the reason we moved to Odoo in the first place.

On technical side, the chat works by long polling the server. In our server this connection stays open for about 50s before being dropped (only to be reestablished a moment later).

This means: a tab has always at least a connection open to the server.
As explained by Ilya Grigorik in High Performance Networking in Chrome, browsers make only so many connections to the same combination of scheme, host and port.

In Chrome this number is 6. In Firefox this can be tuned up or down by tweaking the network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server parameter, but the default is 6.

Combining these, it means that after opening about 6 tabs every AJAX call has to wait up to 50s to be able to even reach the server.

We opted for raising this number in Firefox and to warn users about this. Our user base is small enough and the server has yet to achieve any noticeable load.

Epilogue¶

That’s what our migration to Odoo story has gone so far. A little bit stressful at times, specially when the menus went south for the second time, but I think we have crossed the yellow line now. Should anything comes I’ll report it.

I’d love to hear (or read) about others, so I can learn from their experience.

Filed under: Management, Programming

Tags: Odoo, OpenERP

May 26, 2015