Do not make a request for each public user

hyperknot commented 1 year ago

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Describe your problem

A typical website might have millions of daily public visitors while having just a few active logged-in users.

Currently, the FrontendApi.toSession() makes a request (which is actually 2 requests) every single time it is called. In all the code examples I could find on GitHub, toSession() is simply placed at the top of index.tsx or similar page of the app, meaning that by default we send a request for every single visitor to the auth server.

Some apps might even await on toSession(), which is just very bad for UX.

Describe your ideal solution

There is absolutely no point in sending a request for the non-logged-in users to the auth server. We should just check if a cookie exists and if it does not, then we should just terminate early.

Workarounds or alternatives

AFAIK, there is only 2 ways to do this currently:

modifying @ory/integrations/next-edge or the proxy not to forward it. This is 1 requests less, but still not perfect.
using a second, non-HttpOnly cookie, just for remembering the fact that there is a logged in user.

I think the 2 cookie solution would be the best for performance and UX.

Version

@ory/kratos-client 0.11.0 (but same with client 1.x)

Additional Context

No response

hyperknot commented 1 year ago

A PoC would be:

import Cookies from 'js-cookie'

// upon successful login:
Cookies.set('logged_in', '1', { expires: 3650 }) // 10 years

// in init function
if (!Cookies.get('logged_in')) {
  return
}

try {
  const { data } = await this.ory.toSession()
  this.setSession(data)
} catch (e) {}

This is currently only possible if the app handles the login flow. To make it work universally, Kratos would need to add the logged_in cookie with HttpOnly = false, then it'd be much simpler in the client side.

Ideally this should be totally transparent for the user, hidden behind toSession().

aeneasr commented 1 year ago

Hey, that's a great point :) Please note that this won't work client-side as the client has no way of knowing whether the cookie exists (beacuse it is httpOnly).

We want to provide better high-level SDKs that wrap the basic autogenerated SDK we have here.

We are also working on deploying a system that significantly improves requests latencies, bringing them down to ~25-30ms for unauthenticated requests

hyperknot commented 1 year ago

I implemented this by modifying the Next.js integration API.

Changing this:

          res.headers["set-cookie"] = parse(res)
            .map((cookie) => ({
              ...cookie,
              domain,
              secure,
              encode,
            }))
            .map(({ value, name, ...options }) =>
              serialize(name, value, options as CookieSerializeOptions),
            )

into this:

          const cookiesParsed = parse(res)
          const cookiesMod = cookiesParsed.map(cookie => ({
              ...cookie,
              domain,
              secure,
              encode,
          }))

          const sessionCookie = cookiesMod.filter(c => c.name === 'ory_kratos_session')[0]
          if (sessionCookie) {
            cookiesMod.push({ ...sessionCookie, name: 'login', value: '1', httpOnly: false })
          }

          const cookiesSerialized = cookiesMod.map(({ value, name, ...options }) =>
            serialize(name, value, options as CookieSerializeOptions)
          )
          res.headers['set-cookie'] = cookiesSerialized

It's just the added cookiesMod.push({ ...sessionCookie, name: 'login', value: '1', httpOnly: false }) basically. Everything is copied from the session cookie, except name, value and httpOnly.

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