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Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Dennis HackethalOP revised 6 days ago·#2630

Discussions are getting slower to render as they grow. It’s a rendering issue (not a db issue).

CriticismCriticized1oustanding criticism
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Dennis HackethalOP revised 6 days ago·#2633

I could cache ideas so deeply nested trees can be rendered at once.

Criticized3oustanding criticisms
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Cache invalidation for user-based caching sounds like a nightmare.

Criticism of #2633
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Initial page loads would still be slow for users.

Criticism of #2633
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A single new idea somewhere down the tree could invalidate the cache and slow things down again.

Criticism of #2633
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I could lazy load ideas: only load the parts of the page that would be visible on the current viewport. Then load more parts as the user scrolls.

Criticized2oustanding criticisms
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Complex, requires non-trivial scroll listeners correlated to deeply nested ideas.

Criticism of #2635
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That means cmd + f won’t always work.

Criticism of #2635
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Dennis HackethalOP, 6 days ago·#2636

On initial page load, I could just load the first ten or so top-level ideas and their immediate children, just to reduce wait times and populate the page. Then load the rest asynchronously.

Criticized1oustanding criticism
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Duplicate of #2677/#2683.

Criticism of #2636
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Dennis HackethalOP revised 3 days ago·#2659

I could use ActionController::Live to stream top-level ideas to the page one by one. Instant page load.

Battle tested
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Including that module significantly slows down hot reloads on all pages. I need a tight feedback loop in dev.

Criticism of #2659Criticized1oustanding criticism
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Fast UX is more important than fast developer experience.

Criticism of #2647Criticized1oustanding criticism
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A slow developer experience will slow down all further development, including bug fixes and feature rollouts, which hurts UX as well.

Criticism of #2648
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After resetting my working directory and beginning to implement streams a second time, I can no longer reproduce this issue, despite reasonable attempts to reproduce it.

Criticism of #2647Criticized1oustanding criticism
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Dennis HackethalOP, 4 days ago·#2651

I’ve since been able to reproduce the issue after all. Running a raw SQL query in Idea.tree in combination with the inclusion of the Live module seems to mess with Rails’s reloader.

Criticism of #2650
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Replacing a raw SQL query in Idea.tree with a standard ActiveRecord query solves this issue.

Criticism of #2647
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This page used to take ~3.5 seconds to load. Now it renders within 600ms :)

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Incompatible with Devise authentication: https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/issues/2332

Criticism of #2659Criticized1oustanding criticism
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Dennis HackethalOP revised 3 days ago·#2688

The thread suggests a workaround: use authenticated do … blocks in routes.rb instead of before_action :authenticate_user! in controllers.

It’s probably a good idea to do this anyway to avoid divulging the existence of routes that unauthenticated users don’t need to know exist. (They will get a 404 instead of a 401.)

Criticism of #2670Criticized1oustanding criticism
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Then again, I’d want to redirect users to the sign-in page (and then ideally back to where they were trying to go).

Criticism of #2688
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I could extract discussions#show into a new, separate StreamController or something like it. That controller would not use Devise.

Criticism of #2670
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I could override authenticate_user! in the DiscussionsController.

Criticism of #2670Criticized1oustanding criticism
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That means duplicate functionality; anytime I customize Devise in the future, I’ll have to remember to adjust this one method as well.

Criticism of #2692
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JS modules are always deferred and unusable until the page is fully loaded. As a result, comment buttons and gutters won’t work while ideas are still streaming onto the page.

Criticism of #2659Criticized1oustanding criticism
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Dennis HackethalOP, 2 days ago·#2694

I now purposely prevent interactions with buttons and gutters, and gray them out, until the page is fully loaded. So instead of broken hover effects and interactions, the user gets intentionally disabled elements, and this intentionality is communicated to them.

Once the page is fully loaded, buttons and gutters are enabled and visually restored.

Since the browser’s loading indicator remains visible until then, this behavior shouldn’t violate user expectation.

Criticism of #2671
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cmd + f won’t work reliably.

Criticism of #2659Criticized2oustanding criticisms
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Now that parts of the page are purposely and visually disabled (see #2694), users may not expect everything to be working 100% during a loading state.

Criticism of #2679
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Dennis HackethalOP, 2 days ago·#2696

This problem will surface rarely – users would have to hit cmd + f immediately upon opening the page. For most users, by the time they start typing, the page is already fully loaded. So this seems like a small price to pay in exchange for discussion pages that always render faster.

Criticism of #2679
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Dennis HackethalOP, 3 days ago·#2675

I could have a separate route at /ideas/:id/isolated which renders only the idea without any parents or children. And then a discussion could render a bunch of deeply nested turbo frames loading that route.

Criticized1oustanding criticism
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For large discussions, wouldn’t that flood the server with requests?

Criticism of #2675
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Yes, it would be even worse than #2677 (see criticism #2681), where only top-level ideas were turbo frames.

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The top level ideas could be rendered as turbo frames of ideas#show.

Criticized2oustanding criticisms
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I just tried this. Seemed promising at first but sometimes ideas load out of order. Looks horrible.

Criticism of #2677Criticized1oustanding criticism
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I could render the first ~10 top-level ideas immediately and only render the rest as turbo frames off screen. By the time the user scrolls down, they should all be loaded.

Criticism of #2680
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Too many requests when there are enough top-level ideas.

Criticism of #2677
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While ideas load, cmd +f won’t work.

Criticism of #2677
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Dennis HackethalOP, about 13 hours ago·#2723

I implemented #2659 and it’s much better now. In addition, there is now automated archiving (#2704) and manual archiving (#2711). Archived ideas live on a separate page, so the main page is faster.

Criticism of #2630