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High-Performance Progress Storage

High-Performance Progress Storage (HPPS) is an experimental feature that provides a solid database structure using custom tables to store the user’s course progress and quiz data.

Please note that this feature is still experimental and not fully done.
It’s not ready for production use. If you decide to test it, please use a staging environment.

Benefits

Once out of the experimental phase, this feature aims to improve scalability and increase the performance of the plugin.

In its current stage, the feature only works on the front end of the site. This means that most backend features like Reports and Grading will still read from the comments data.

Background

Sensei LMS relies on the comments and commentmeta tables for storing the user’s course progress and quiz data. This is fine for most cases.

HPPS introduces dedicated tables that are indexed. This results in a more optimized way of reading data, which enables sites to scale to their maximum potential.

How to enable High-Performance Progress Storage

Sites can switch from the default WordPress comments storage to table storage by following the steps below.

To activate HPPS and start reading data from the tables, sites will first need to get both the comments and tables data in sync:

  1. In WP Admin, navigate to Sensei LMS -> Settings -> Experimental Features
  2. Enable the feature by ticking “Store the progress of your students in separate tables.” checkbox. This only enables the feature settings.
  3. Save the changes and get back to the same screen to see the additional settings.
  4. Tick the “Synchronize the student progress between storages.” checkbox.
  5. Once this setting is enabled, a migration background job will start. It will copy the comments data to the newly created tables.
  6. After both storages are successfully synchronized, you’ll be able to select the option to switch the storage to “High-Performance progress storage“.

Data Storage

You can switch between the data stores freely when the storage synchronization is enabled.

  • If you select the “WordPress comments based storage” option (default), the site will read data from the comments and commentmeta tables. The custom tables are not utilized in this scenario.
  • If you select the “High-Performance progress storage” option, the site will read data from the optimized custom tables. For now, this is true only for the front end of the site.

Synchronization

When the “Progress storage synchronization” option is enabled, data will be stored in both data stores – HPPS custom tables and comments tables.

As of now, synchronization is required to be able to use the HPPS custom tables. The reason is that not all plugin features and extensions are updated to use the new custom tables. Having the option enabled makes sure all is working as intended.