Add progress reporting to LoadParameterFile

[Harry Jeffery]

Now that SaveParameterFile has begun to output very large XML files (~50MB), it takes a considerable amount of time to load these parameter files back into Mantid.

Currently, LoadParameterFile does not report its progress to the user (and consequently cannot be cancelled).

It should provide progress updates on a regular basis.

[Harry Jeffery]

Refs #10260 Remove usage of LoadParameterFile::execManually

Replace all external calls to this static method with use of a child algorithm instead.

Changeset: abb99045c84a700c1df1b4435cd57d58c7812f1e

[Harry Jeffery]

Refs #10260 Remove LoadParameterFile::execManually

Changeset: 2116279f31c618325a38413797ef8e8c921b4aef

[Harry Jeffery]

Refs #10260 Improve LoadParameterFile progress reporting

Changeset: d7e9c176bc0144e0b4b615b933bc507a17f4a91a

[Harry Jeffery]

Refs #10260 Optimise setComponentLinks

Internally Poco::XML::NodeList::item performs an O(n) linked-list traversal to look up an item by index. We were calling item within an O(n) loop, pushing our performance up to O(n^{2). Let's not do that. Let's traverse the DOM ourselves at O(n).}

On my machine this brought the execution time of LoadParameterFile down from ~1,400 seconds to ~9 seconds. That's about 140x faster.

Changeset: 21597ea53fdaa34bb74ef6056dd51584cc42259a

[Harry Jeffery]

Refs #10260 Fix doxygen warning

Changeset: a0e9628fb2ab4a2e46d23569f09492eecf946c01

[Harry Jeffery]

Testing

• Run LoadParameterFile on a large parameter file. Progress is reported and it will run much more quickly whilst behaving the same.
• Verify no tests were broken
• Inspect code

Branch: ​https://github.com/mantidproject/mantid/compare/feature/10260_loadparamfile_report_progress

[Dan Nixon]

Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/feature/10260_loadparamfile_report_progress'

Full changeset: ​b9ddaa464db796ef5bde0bc294ef33a726e4844a

[Dan Nixon]

Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/feature/10260_loadparamfile_report_progress'

Full changeset: ​b9ddaa464db796ef5bde0bc294ef33a726e4844a

[Stuart Campbell]

This ticket has been transferred to github issue ​11102