[aur-general] AUR RPC search results custom fields

[Francesc Ortiz]

Hi,

I just subscribed to the AUR mailing list. I developed tupac, a script
that does fast aur searches. I got really glad when i found that there
is an RPC for AUR, but all my happiness vanished when i saw that the
search results show no information, and that i have to add another
query for each result if i want to show aditional information to the
search results. From my house, this adds a 550 ms query to each
result. I gave a try to arson to proove it.

Adding the possibility of specifying the fields you want to show in
the search results would reduce rpc query time and would also reduce
server load. Getting custom fields would be 1 connection vs N+1
(N=number results, 1 the search) connections that you have to do now
for a pacman-like search. And in what time regards, as an example, for
30 results now I need (30+1)*550ms = around 17 seconds.

I also see that this would be more intense work for the database, so
it would be reasonable to add a result limit to the search, if you use
custom fields, in order to reduce subqueries.

And, about usability, imagine that
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php took 13 seconds to load.

What do you think, did I sound convincing enough? :P