Trac issue tracker is slow

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 20, 2008, at 11:21 PM, William Siegrist wrote:

> On Jun 11, 2008, at 3:31 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> The Trac issue tracker is very slow, and it has been for weeks, maybe
>> months.
>>
>> View a ticket: 10 seconds
>> Preview a change to a ticket: 10 seconds
>> Make a change to a ticket: 14 seconds
>> Show the New Ticket form: 6 seconds
>> Show the Custom Query page: 10 seconds
>> Find all non-closed tickets with "mysql" in the summary: 19 seconds
>
> All of the above invoke the restrict_owner code which gives us the  
> selector for owner instead of a text box. The way Trac generates  
> that selector is very inefficient, and the code in v0.11 (due out  
> this weekend) doesnt look much better.  The feature just wasnt  
> intended for such a large selector it seems.

Thanks for looking into this and finding the cause.

> I've tried a few things to see what could help, and the only thing  
> that makes a difference is switching to the textbox. In fact, the  
> tickets load as fast as every other part of trac when using the  
> text field.

Is there a way to hook into Trac and just give it a pre-made menu to  
display there? Or could we somehow post-process Trac's page to fill  
in the menu ourselves? I already posted a script to get the list of  
maintainers out of the portfiles (in some ticket) which could be run  
e.g. daily and turned into a ready-made menu.inc.html that could be  
put into the right place in the Trac pages, if there were a hook with  
which to do that.

> The benefit of the text box, aside from performance, is that people  
> can assign tickets to users to prompt for more info, and tickets  
> can be assigned to maintainers who are not committers.
>
> The bad part is having to type in the maintainer's or user's name.  
> Its pretty easy to find that info, via the port command or the  
> ticket page, but there's a chance for typos if people dont copy/paste.

Is it really possible to assign a ticket to a person who is not  
registered in Trac?

> So let me know if this change is worth the performance.  If some  
> devs want to see the difference, you can ping me in IRC so I can  
> switch the option, let you load a few of these pages, and then  
> switch back. Its quite noticeable.

Absent a way to build the menu ourselves, my vote would be to switch  
to a text box. I usually copy/paste the maintainer's email address  
from the "port info" output anyway, since we never got the full list  
of maintainers in the drop down box.

[thinks for a minute]

I mean, we could even do it with JavaScript. Make Trac output a text  
box, which is what people would see if JavaScript is off. And write a  
JavaScript function which would swap that out for a drop-down menu  
with our list of maintainers. If we can use our own templates with  
our own links and graphics (which we clearly can) then we can also  
have our own JavaScript code run on the page.

Or instead of swapping the text box for a drop-down, we could use one  
of those type-ahead auto-fill-in text box extension thingies. Umm...  
I could probably whip something like that up for you.