We only ever show 3 or 4 people in search suggestions
(possibly w/a couple variations, like pm-with/sender/etc.),
so we can try to search a smaller subset of people
before going through the entire realm.
We use message_store.user_ids() for this, since you
typically want to search messages for people that
have sent messages recently, and we already sort
based on PM conversations.
This should avoid some memory allocations.
We also use build_person_matcher to avoid
repeating the same logic over and over
again to process the query into termlets.
We also remove people.get_all_persons() and
people.person_matches_query().
This may actually be a slowdown for the worst case
scenario, but it sets us up to be able to easily
short circuit the removal of diacritic characters
for users that have pure ascii names.
For example, czo has lots of names like this:
- Tim Abbott
- Steve Howell
Since they're pure ascii, we can do a one-time
check. A subsequent commit will show how we use
this.
This looks like simple code cleanup, but it's more
than that.
The code cleanup here is that we don't have three
callbacks to get a list of typeaheads for bootstrap.
Instead, we just have one function that does all the
main work.
And then the speedup comes from the fact we no longer
need to remove diacritics from the query for every
time through our loop of seeing if a person matches
the query.
It's a bit subtle to see in the diff, but these are
the relevant lines:
const matcher = exports.get_person_or_user_group_matcher(query);
const filtered_results = _.filter(people_and_groups, matcher);
Before this, bootstrap was doing $.grep, and we'd have
to reinitialize the matcher for every person.
If you profile this before and after, you'll see that
remove_diacritics gets called fewer times.
To profile this, you want to loads lots of users into
your DB and try to autocomplete "Extra", as in "Extra1 User".
If you try to autocomplete something else, then my patch
won't really help, and `remove_diacritics` will still
show up as expensive. Because it is that expensive a function.
These had to be done in tandem, since they were
both kinda coupled to the function that is now
called query_matches_name_description.
(This commit slightly negatively impacts PM
lookups, but this is addressed in the subsequent
commit, which makes PMs much faster. The impact
is super minimal--it's just an extra function
dispatch.)
This may seem silly now, since we are returning a function
that still dispatches over all flavors of search for
every item, but subsequent commits will make it obvious
why I'm doing this.
We want to do our own matching of items, rather than
just giving a callback to bootstrap, which does $.grep
on all the items.
Doing our own matching gives us flexibility for future
improvements like custom data structures for searching
through big amounts of data. Even in the short term
we can speed up searches by pulling expensive operations
outside the grep/filter call.
This architecture has been in place for our search
bar since ~2014.
We have ~5 years of proof that we'll probably never
extend Dict with more options.
Breaking the classes into makes both a little faster
(no options to check), and we remove some options
in FoldDict that are never used (from/from_array).
A possible next step is to fine-tune the Dict to use
Map internally.
Note that the TypeScript types for FoldDict are now
more specific (requiring string keys). Of course,
this isn't really enforced until we convert other
modules to TS.
We had a potentially nasty bug where we
weren't guaranteeing that all/stream/everyone
collated in consistent ways inside of
`compare_people_for_relevance`, which can
send certain types of sort algorithms into
an infinite loop. I doubt this ever happened
in practice, but it's obviously worth fixing.
Now we also have a clear tiebreaker between
any two all/everyone/stream mentions, which
is the idx field.
Finally, this should be a bit more efficient.
This name was misleading, since this code is used
in sort_recipients, which happens when you, for
example, autocomplete persons in the "To:" box
when composing (and has nothing to do with
mentioning).
This makes it a bit easier to find common patterns,
plus it sets us up to pull the calls even further
up the stack.
The first rule of dealing with user data is sanitize
at the edges, not deep down in some function that
has many callers. Putting this code so deep down
in the stack means it's more likely to be called in
a loop.
This moves clean_query into all the callers
of query_matches_source_attrs.
This doesn't change anything performance-wise,
but it sets up future commits.
This change is easy--we only had one caller.
This change means any query going against a
target with multiple `match_attrs`, such as
user names (first name, last) only has to
clean the query once per person.
We want to mostly deprecate this function (see
the comment I added), so I gave it a more specific
name.
Ideally I'd just fix `stream_create`, but it does
use this function in a couple places, and it's helpful
to reuse the same sort here. In one place stream_create
actually unshifts the "me" user back to the top of the
list, which makes sense for its use case.
If two user_ids in a recent huddle have ids
that sort lexically differently than numerically,
such as 7 and 66, then we were creating two
different buckets in pm_conversations.
This regression was introduced in
263ac0eb45 on
November 21, 2019.
Instead of having our callers pass in a possibly
non-canonical version of a user_ids_string, just
have them pass in a list.
The next commit will canonicalize the sort.
The only thing get_color() does is look
up a sub:
exports.get_color = function (stream_name) {
const sub = exports.get_sub(stream_name);
if (sub === undefined) {
return stream_color.default_color;
}
return sub.color;
};
So if we have a sub already, there's no point
calling the helper.
Obviously, this isn't a huge deal, but it happens
N times during page load.
This should make any operation on subscribed
streams faster (we won't need to filter out
unsubscribed streams every time).
I started writing this before I realized we
had a bug where we call `subscribed_streams`
in a nested loop.
After fixing the bugs, this is not as much of
a bottleneck, but it's still a speedup in many
important places:
* build left sidebar
* every keystroke in search bar
* first keystroke in making #stream_links
* every keystroke in compose stream box
The streams settings code is kinda complicated.
It does a non-deterministic sort of the "others"
bucket when you add elements to the left panel.
They get hidden, anyway. Our values() call now
puts subscribed streams first. It never guaranteed
order, but putting subscribed streams first is
probably a good behavior for most situations.
This defers O(N*S) operations, where
N = number of streams
S = number of subscribers per stream
In many cases we never do an O(N) operation on
a stream. Exceptions include:
- checking stream links from the compose box
- editing a stream
- adding members to a newly added stream
An operation that used to be O(N)--computing
the number of subscribers--is now O(1), and we
don't even pay O(N) on a one-time basis to
compute it (not counting the cost to build the
array from JSON, but we have to do that).
Calling `set_filter_out_inactives` is expensive, since we
count up the number of subscribed streams, which iterates
through all your streams, creates a new list of subscribed
streams, then counts them.
In my dev setup, I created 700 streams, and this shaved
about 700ms off of the initial call to `build_stream_list`.
If we aren't showing users emails, then we don't
want to use emails in the search.
And if we are showing users emails, we want to
search on the email that's displayed to them.
For admins this will be delivery_email.
For regular users we arguably shouldn't search
on emails either, since it mostly causes confusion,
but this commit just preserves the current
behavior for those users (unless `show_email` is
false).
We want to be able to unit test this value,
since it's conditional on several factors:
- am I an admin?
- can non-admins view emails?
- do we have delivery_email for the user?
I'm mocking show_email in the tests, since the
show_email code is in `settings_org` and
kind of hard to unit test. It's not impossible,
but it's too much for this commit. (Either
we need to extract it out to a nice file or
deal with mocking jQuery. That module is
mostly data-oriented, so it would be nice
to have something like `settings_config` that
is actually pure data.)
This was duplicate code. I'm moving it to people
for pragmatic reasons--it's hard to unit test stuff
in settings_users.js due to all the jQuery.
It's also nice to have all people-related search
code in one place, just for auditing purposes.
It appears c28c3015 caused a regression where we
set `email` to undefined if a user does not have
`delivery_email` set, and this causes filtering
of users to fail for admins doing user settings.
This fixes only one of the issues reported in
issue #13554.
There's probably no easy fix to scrolling taking
long, but I think fixing search will mostly
address that complaint.
The Rust folks seem to agree with me that the
search results are too noisy. If I search for
"s" I get:
* names like Steve (good)
* names like Jesse (noisy)
* anybody with s in their email (super noisy)
Here is the relevant code:
return (
item.full_name.toLowerCase().indexOf(value) >= 0 ||
email.toLowerCase().indexOf(value) >= 0
);
We now can call is_ascii only once per search termlet
when we are filtering multiple persons on the same
query. (This requires the caller to use
`build_person_matcher` outside a loop or before
a `_.filter` call.)
This is not a major speedup, but we do a couple
simple things here:
- trim the query outside the function we
build (that might be called multiple times)
- don't split names before we possibly
early-exit with an email match
This will allow use to change some O(N) behavior
to O(1) where we are performing the same query
on a bunch of people. (Subsequent commits will
actually take advantage of this prefactoring.)
Once we have max_items results, stop trying
to get more items.
This should really help large realms when
you do a search on streams that turns up
more than N streams (where N is about 12).
We won't even bother to find people.
This class gives us more control over attaching
suggestions to our eventual result. The main
thing we do now is remove duplicates as they're
encountered.
This will make sense in the follow up commit,
where we can short circuit actions as soon as
we get enough results.
This has a few benefits:
- we remove some duplicate code
- we can see finalize_results in profiles
It turns out finalize_results is expensive
for some searches. If the search itself doesn't
do a ton of work but returns a lot of results,
we see it in finalize_results. It brings to
attention that we should be truncating items
earlier instead of doing lots of unnecessary
work.
This isn't a huge speedup, but it's an easy
code change.
We remove the two-liner highlight_with_escaping,
which was only called in one place, and when
we inline it into the caller, we can pull the
first line, which builds the regex, out of the
loop.
Steve Howell