Reflectometry performance

[Tom-Willemsen]

Description of work

Improve the performance of the reflectometry OPI in terms of memory & cpu for rules, and also in terms of not sleeping on the UI thread from OPI scripts.

Note that I don't think the original issue was actually a real memory leak at all - rather, the reflectometry OPI was taking up a very large amount of space (400MB) - INTER had two references to it (refl perspective and synoptic) while POLREF had three references to it (refl perspective, synoptic, device screen).

We have made changes elsewhere so that refl front panel can no longer be opened as a synoptic/device screen. The changes in this PR bring the REFL OPI resource consumption down to more reasonable levels. Combined, these changes should be sufficient to ensure that the excessive memory consumption seen on INTER/POLREF is fixed.

Ticket

ISISComputingGroup/IBEX#7212

Acceptance criteria

On master:

• Open a fresh client
• Open VisualVM and connect it to the running client
• Wait for the client resource usage to stabilize (e.g. wait about 60s after start)
• Switch to INTER or another reflectometer of your choice
• Wait for the client resource usage to stabilize (e.g. wait about 60s after instrument switch)
• Press "Perform GC" in VisualVM and note the "used" memory just after the GC
  • This is the "baseline" memory
• Switch to reflectometry perspective, and click at least once on each tab to activate the OPIs
  • Note, because of Reflectometry server: don't serve more elements in LOG than the declared size of LOG IBEX#7276, the refl log opi may cause the reflectometer to appear disconnected. If so, restart from the beginning of this test but skip clicking on the refl log opi.
• Press "Perform GC" in VisualVM and note the "used" memory just after the GC
• Subtract the baseline memory from the memory you just measured to get a number for the memory used by the REFL perspective.

Then:

• Perform the same steps on this branch. Verify that this branch has a significantly lower memory usage from the reflectometry perspective
• Verify that the rules are functionally the same on master and on this branch
• Verify that the new manual tests added in rules_test.opi pass on this branch
• Verify that the changed functionality in populate_list.py still works

System tests

• Manual system test for OPI rules added. OPI rules are very difficult to test in an automated way.

Documentation

wiki

Code Review

• Is the code of an acceptable quality?
• If the change is to an OPI, does the check_opi_format.py script in C:\Instrument\Dev\ibex_gui\base\uk.ac.stfc.isis.ibex.opis pass?
• Do the changes function as described and is it robust?
• Is there associated PR for the release notes?

Final Steps

• Reviewer has also merged the release notes

[Tom-Willemsen]

Note for reviewer: once you are happy with this PR, please:

• Go to ICP_P2
• Move css_gui_dependencies to css_gui_dependencies_old
• Move css_gui_dependencies_7212 to css_gui_dependencies
• Update this line to point at gui_dependencies rather than gui_dependencies_7212