[people-lens] performance issues with people lens

[Sergio Schvezov]

SUT:
manhattan-quantal-armhf 20121218-4
canonical/assets revno 4
canonical/hybris revno 94
canonical/ubuntu_chroot revno 22
canonical/uchroot revno 9
patches revno 66

unity-people-daemon just goes crazy when too many contacts are loaded making the system crawl. It's spikes up for a while (top)

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 1334 phablet 20 0 120m 16m 6604 R 93.3 2.4 0:10.96 unity-people-da

Facebook contacts: 220
Twiiter contacts: 258

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

some fixes already committed for this, more to come in MR

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Adding the people lens as work is needed there, too. Currently the lens iterates over all the contacts and looks for the string in some of the fields (see lp:indaba/src/daemon.vala:194). Instead, it should leverage the folks' backend search capabilities (if any) or maybe libcolumbus.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

This is still an issue with build 140 on Galaxy Nexus. After importing my 350 contacts from Google, the phone pretty much becomes unusable as the people lens loads all of the contacts and uses up all of the system memory. The shell becomes extremely slow and you can't really use the phone. It's critical we fix this as we're encouraging people to use their phones as daily devices and large amounts of contacts are likely.

For dogfood release, two options were discussed with Pat:
1) Remove the people lens view from the shell but keep the favorites contacts carousel on the home lens, adding the people lens preview functionality to the home lens.
2) fix the people lens so it can handle hundreds/thousands of contacts.
3) remove people lens completely

Option 1 is desired given the timeframe.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Import hundreds of contacts, easiest way is from google if you have lots of contacts there. Preferrably some will have pictures.
Steps to import from google:
> syncevolution --configure --sync-property "<email address hidden>" --sync-property "password=YOURPASSWORD" Google_Contacts
 > syncevolution --sync refresh-from-server Google_Contacts addressbook

This will get the first 50 contacts only. If you have more than 50 then also run the following command after running the above. Run this command multiple times as it will keep getting chunks of 50.

> syncevolution --sync one-way-from-server Google_Contacts addressbook

2) reboot phone or do a search from people lens to get all the contacts to load

Expected Results:
Phone should function as normal

Actual Results:
Shell extremely slow. People lens can't even fully render. Much corruption of graphics observed. App slow to launch.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

We went for a simpler fix (and actually keeping more functionality in the dash) for now - we're just limiting the number of contacts displayed to 50. You can still search through your whole contact list and use the lens as you did before, just the default display will show 50 tops.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

@saviq
That works. Let do it.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

I'm setting this to incomplete to make sure it's not lost if we ever come back with the people lens.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

Moving to High as it's not critical any more, since we don't have people lens atm.

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

Closing this down. The fact that it still has "lens" in the title shows how old it is. The complete codebase has been replaced by now anyways.