Search making excessive requests for snap details and search

[Bret Barker]

If you turn on snapd debugging and watch the log, you will see some excessive hits when working in Gnome Software. In particular, it seems:

- Search makes the search request and then a details hit for every result
- After clicking into a snap detail page and returning to the list, the query is repeated.

Details requests should only be needed when clicking on a result, and returning to the search results should not repeat the query.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

To enable snapd HTTP debugging:

in /etc/environment:
SNAPD_DEBUG=1
SNAPD_DEBUG_HTTP=7
and restart snapd

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/merge_requests/31

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-software - 3.28.0-0ubuntu4

---------------
gnome-software (3.28.0-0ubuntu4) bionic; urgency=medium

  * debian/patches/0001-Stop-searching-multiple-times-on-search-page.patch:
    - Stop duplicate search queries (LP: #1756184)

 -- Robert Ancell <email address hidden> Fri, 16 Mar 2018 12:21:56 +1300

[Bret Barker (noise)]

That change only fixes the case of returning from search results (confirmed fixed as above), but not the n+1 API requests for the initial search + details of each result.

Note this is particularly noticeable on initial launch where I currently see a total of 80 requests: 5 searches for different sections and the details hits for each search result.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

3.28.0-0ubuntu5 should now not do a detail request for each of the featured snaps (uses the metadata from the search result instead). It will now do a detail lookup the first time you click on a snap.

Note that we do still do a detail lookup on each installed snap when you start - this is a long standing issue due to the icon information not being reliable on local snaps. If these requests are an issue we should tackle that in another bug.

[Bret Barker (noise)]

Much better, thanks Robert!

I think we can live with the installed snaps requests for now.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

I'm about to land a change to master that will use the .desktop file icons when available - this should make it into Bionic and further decrease the server load.