Discussion

I've shared details about the issue here: campground.bonfire.cafe/post...

For those who are interested, here is an explanation of why the campground had become so slow, and how we fixed that (browsing feeds is now up to 95% faster!):

When you're browsing your feed on Bonfire, each page on the app displays 20 activities, but there are tens of thousands of activities in total. Fetching all the activities at once, including related data like their authors and threads, and checking permissions for each activity can be slow and inefficient.

To address this challenge, we implemented deferred joins and boundary checking. Instead of fetching all the data and performing boundary checks for every activity before selecting the ones for a specific page, we defer these operations until after an initial pagination has been applied.

Here's how it works: First, the app creates an optimized query that loads only the necessary information needed for pagination. This includes filtering activities based on a specific feed, ensuring that only relevant activities are considered. This optimized query is designed to load less data from disk and thus is faster. It returns just the IDs of one or two pages, which could be up to 40 activities.

Next, the database takes the results of the optimized query and fetches the complete details of those activities. At this stage, it also computes the boundaries for each of those 40 activities, checking permissions to determine if the user has access to view them. The database filters out any activities that the user is not allowed to see. Finally, another round of pagination is applied to the filtered activities, ensuring that 1 to 20 activities are returned as the final result.

By deferring the retrieval of complete details and boundary computation until after pagination, the database minimizes the amount of data it needs to process. This significantly improves performance, even when the instance contains a large number of activities. It reduces the time and resources required to handle pagination, resulting in a much faster and more responsive user experience.

For those familiar with SQL, this looks something like (though the real query is much more complex):

SELECT * from activities
INNER JOIN (SELECT id from activities WHERE [...] LIMIT 40)
LEFT OUTER JOIN [...]
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT [...] WHERE [boundaries.id](http://boundaries.id) = [activities.id](http://activities.id))
LIMIT 20

Exciting news! Bonfire 0.9.4 is here! 🔥
We've improved the UX of user moderation and boundaries to ensure a safer, more engaging community experience. But that's not all - expect a much faster performance and a smoother experience with our latest optimisations! #NewRelease 🚀

@hxgdzyuyi it looks like we have a bug in the issue reporting code 🙈 and the error message wasn't copied into your post. do you remember what it was?

The main cause for slowness in browsing Bonfire has been identified and fixed. Such a relief! 😅 🔥 🏃

yeah I think we need re-wire some javascript for that

🔥🔥🔥 New Bonfire release: v0.9.2! We're thrilled to announce the latest update, bringing you a more robust and tested boundary system and polished UI.

Testing on Firefox on Android both of the videos autoplay when I click them.

Is there a how to get started blog post or documentation somewhere?

I am just looking for some ideas on how I can test out the features here in the Campground.

I really can't figure out in any practical way how circles, roles, and boundaries work.

@Oceane testing an image with description... what error did you get?

The campground instance was updated to a new release with various improvements 🔥

@bonfire@indieweb.social The latest release includes a way to switch between both modes while drafting a post, so you don't have to choose just one!

@versolalto The pages extension is currently disabled because it is still in development (you should be getting an error saying that instead of the ones you got though, will look into that). Sorry you didn't get a response last time!

There's also a merge request: gitlab.com/malware-filter/ph...

Yeah I see s3.nl-ams.scw.cloud on the list. Will open an issue on that repo.

@evanp welcome 🔥

The limit is configurable in instance settings (see screenshot) and visible to people considering whether to join an instance on the about page: campground.bonfire.cafe/about

@Oceane it shouldn't be up to us (as software builders), but up to each instance to decide if they want to have a limit and what number that should be. Currently the default is 2000 words (not characters!) but we can make that higher... From a technical point of view it can be useful to have some kind of limit (just like there is for filesize when uploading images) just to avoid slowing down the site or over-using resources, whether by accident or maliciously.