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mastodon / mastodon-ios

Official iOS app for Mastodon
https://app.joinmastodon.org/ios
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[BUG] Search should not send each character to API while typing / Exhaustive database load #663

Open ralfr opened 1 year ago

ralfr commented 1 year ago

Is there an existing issue for this?

Current Behavior

When users type into the search field, every keystroke is send to the backend. Likely this is meant to enhance the user experience and provide a classical type-ahed search experience.

However, given the complexity of the database queries executed on the backed, this causes a ton of load on the backend side PostgreSQL database, which is essential for the entire performance of any instance.

We've seen the iOS app causing literally thousands of complex queries looking for "R", then for "RA" then for "RAL" then for "RALF" and so on.

Expected Behavior

Type-ahead should be implemented in a way where, e.g.: The client waits until the user has at least provided three characters AND there was a typing pause of 800 ms or higher.

Steps To Reproduce

n/a

Environment

n/a

Anything else?

No response

j-f1 commented 1 year ago

At least on iOS, there’s currently throttling to once every 500ms. That said, it might make sense to increase it?

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/blob/df5099dd30f1fc093143b4cc38edb7724d8d5c52/Mastodon/Scene/Search/SearchDetail/SearchDetailViewController.swift#L189

Yonodactyl commented 1 year ago

I think that if we are introducing adjustments to the debounce, we should consider also adding some responsive feature like an ActivityIndicator or showing the RefreshControl on the Tableview. It would reinforce the idea behind #655