sortingview backend status check in figurl

[lfrank]

The sorting view backend seems to hang occasionally, unfortunately without any status messages in the log except 'cleaning up parallel job handler'.

It would be very helpful to have some sort of report on the figurl page that the backend is up / unresponsive so we know when to restart it.

[magland]

@jsoules let's chat about what needs to happen here

[lfrank]

One other question related to this: would it be possible to do a quick precomputation of the required dataset size and the amount of free RAM to let the user know if the computation can't be done with the current resources? Otherwise the backend seems to crash / cause problems.

[magland]

@jsoules let's revisit this. Adding a check to the figurl framework to indicate whether a backend is connected (ie, not specific to sortingview).