At SolDevelo, we’re keen to help tackle some of the performance challenges in OpenMRS O3. We want to focus on real issues that users face—ones where improvements would bring meaningful value to the community. But to make sure we’re addressing the right problems, we’d love some guidance!
I came across some discussions on Talk, with the latest one being: O3 Performance Improvement
And the related Epic: O3-2621
However, both are a few months old, so I’m not sure how up-to-date they are.
From what I’ve gathered, there seem to be two possible areas where we could contribute:
Fixing specific known bottlenecks – for example, adding pagination to certain endpoints that currently slow things down.
Reproducing real-world deployment scenarios – setting up an environment to simulate actual performance issues that users encounter.
The first option seems like a quicker win to get started and make an immediate impact.
What do you think? Are there specific areas where our efforts would be most valuable?
Weird one… I was able to reproduce a performance bug which that PR fixed, but it didn’t seem to have as dramatic of an impact on overall end-point performance, so yes, it’s still there, but I don’t know what approach to recommend.
A simpler place we need help is simply in adding more things to be tested. We have just two personas who simulate two flows: registration and filling in a visit form, so building out more scenarios would likely be an even bigger win if it helps us highlight other places in the O3 application where data-fetching takes longer than it should.
Hi everyone!
I’m currently working on the Performance Testing Enhancement Project for OpenMRS as part of GSoC 2025. I’ve been setting up the testing framework and working on adding new personas (Clerk, Nurse, Doctor) to simulate real-world workflows.
I noticed the discussion about performance bottlenecks, especially with the Get Locations endpoint. If it’s a known issue, would adding specific load tests for it be useful? I’d love to contribute by reproducing the issue within our performance tests and seeing how it behaves under different conditions.
Let me know if this aligns with current priorities or if there are other areas where more testing would be valuable.
I’m going to look into the location endpoint, so from my perspective getting a repeatable tests made would be useful to easily judge the improvement - but my perspective and the OMRS might be different in this case.
we’ve looked into the performance of the FHIR Get Location endpoint, and we found some interesting solution that improves the endpoint by 70-85%, but it does involve some design change around FHIR Translator classes.
Notes on the results
it was measured using the openmrs-contrib-performance-test project, export SIMULATION_PRESET=dev TIER_COUNT=2 TIER_DURATION_MINUTES=1 && ./mvnw gatling:test
it was executed on a Local as-is
and it was executed with an artificial network Delay of 5ms, added at docker container level, to all containers, mainly to highlight an impact of DB queries and simulate deployment in a cloud (slow cloud )
The results
[ms]
Local - 95th percentile
Local - Mean
Delay - 95th percentile
Delay - Mean
Before
271
200
3762
3555
After
58
35
1361
955
Gain
+78%
+82%
+63%
+73%
See ZIP file attached to O3-4544 for full results.
The change
I’ve made a PR with the code-change here. Some technical details are included in the PR’s description - but the short explanation is that we reduced the number of DB queries.
The commit is named PoC, as it affects only the Get Location and the idea/implementation might need further refinement. This change just seemed to have the least effort with a nice impact.
The comments
The PR itself shouldn’t break anything, but since it introduces a change in very common API, it would be great to hear what do Community thinks.
I’m not sure if you get updates about this thread so I’m pinging @dkayiwa@ibacher.
We’re really happy to contribute, and it’s great to see the impact it had!
Lately, at SolDevelo, we’ve been focusing a lot on Java performance, and we’d love to bring similar improvements to a wider audience. It would really help us if we could share a short testimonial on our website to reinforce the promise that we can deliver these kinds of optimizations.
I’m currently working on the Performance Testing Enhancement Project for OpenMRS as part of GSoC 2025. I’ve been setting up the testing framework and working on adding new personas (Clerk, Nurse, Doctor) to simulate real-world workflows.
