Requests system is slow after volume select

[Baroquem]

(JIRA issue: https://issues.library.cornell.edu/browse/DISCOVERYACCESS-2935)

Mary Beth reported the following:

I did the D&A dog and pony show for Access Services staff today and one of the issues they brought up was the slow appearance of the request button for jounals.

Library Journal: https://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/350332 was one they showed me today – you click ‘request’ then you choose your volume from the dropdown and nothing happens for a while (about sixteen seconds for me just now), until the request form comes up. Not sure if this is because there are many holdings to parse. Some impatient person (name withheld to protect the innocent) requesting items from the annex experienced this yesterday and just assumed something was stuck/broken etc… And then folks mentioned this has been an issue in other cases as well. Can something be done? A message that may take a few minutes for that info to load or something?

[Baroquem]

I think the culprit is Borrow Direct. Unfortunately, the way Requests is set up at the moment, you reenter the system each time you select a volume. When you do that, it checks BD again for availability — and the Borrow Direct API can be very slow, easily up to 16 seconds at times. I may be able to cache the availability value, though, so that it doesn’t hit the API again with each volume selection.