CUNY Academic Commons

Load times were normal for me in a few tests just now. So we're all on the same page, the intended flow is:

a. From /papers/, click "Create New Paper"
b. You are directed to /papers/new/, which has the "Loading new paper message"
c. An AJAX request is fired to create the new paper on the server (you can see it in your JS console)
d. Once the AJAX request returns a result (the ID of the newly created paper), the page redirects to a URL like https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/?post_type=cacsp_paper&p=45237#edit=true, where 45237 is the ID of the newly created paper

If you do experience slowness, please take careful note of where in this flow it's happening.

I ran some profiling and found that the query for pre-populating the "Readers" dropdown was taking a long time, especially for users who have lots of friends and are members of lots of groups. This is why Matt, the most popular person on the Commons, is experiencing the problem so severely.

When building the Readers interface, I opted to pre-load potential Readers, because it makes the interface feel much faster than when we do AJAX autocomplete. For this reason, I don't want to roll back the pre-loading altogether (which is one possible solution here).

Instead, I've added a caching layer for the Readers dropdown. It's pretty crude and coarse-grained, which is mostly the fault of BuddyPress; if BP had better caching for friendship and group-member queries, I could do laser-focused caching for paper Readers only. As things stand, in the interest of time, I've chunked together the entire potential-reader cache so that a big array is cached for each combination of logged-in user + paper. All such caches are controlled by a single last_changed incrementor, so any reader/group-member/friendship action across the entire site will invalidate all caches. This is far from ideal, but it's the best I can do on short notice. I'll make a note to make some of these improvements in BP, at which point we can improve the cache implementation here. (Adding Ray as a watcher.)

https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/social-paper/commit/ff5c06a5865424b047feec9fbf30dc93b2b26b32

I'm going to put this ticket in 1.9.1 under the assumption that I've identified the main culprit behind the loading delay. Matt, after the release, could I ask you to let me know whether you notice a difference? If not, we can reopen for more investigation.