bug#25045: [Website] Packages page takes too long to load

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Luis Felipe López Acevedo <felipe.lopez@openmailbox.org> skribis:

> On 2016-11-28 12:00, Alex Sassmannshausen wrote:
>> Hi Luis,
>>
>> Indeed, I had a first bash at solving this problem by providing a
>> set of
>> static html pages paginated by the first letter of the package name.
>>
>> I'm not particularly wedded to this solution, so if you feel strongly
>> about going another way, I'd be keen to hear/see about it.
>>
>> In the meantime, I'm open to testing/feedback.  I will unfortunately
>> not
>> be able to put work into this until at least Saturday/Sunday, as some
>> Perl work has higher priority at the moment.
>>
>> But let me know if you have questions or feedback!
>>
>> Best wishes,
>
> Hi, Alex :)
>
> The solution I had in mind includes an alphabetic index, and
> pagination as well. However, it includes a few more things, and would
> take some time to design and implement. So I think we should use your
> patch to fix the size issue as soon as possible.

I agree!

Alex, was there anything left to address?  If not, feel free to push.
:-)

> For what is worth, this is what I had in mind:
>
> /packages/
> First page of the list of packages. Packages listed here only provide
> a summary: package logo (if any), name, version, description, and an
> indicator if it has issues. This page also has filters to find
> packages (for now, alphabetic filter. In the future, category filter,
> and search box).
>
> /packages/page/N/
> Page N of the list of packages.
>
> /packages/a/
> First page of the list of packages whose name starts with A. Packages
> are presented the same way as in /packages/.
>
> /packages/a/page/N/
> Page N of the list of packages starting with letter A.
>
> /packages/icecat/X.Y.Z/
> Page with details about IceCat version X.Y.Z. It includes all the
> information about this package, including its issues (which are
> currently listed in a separate page along with the issues of other
> packages: /packages/issues.html). Including the issues of a package in
> its detail page could avoid having the current issues page grow too
> much, like the current Packages page.
>
> This static pagination and filtering would generate A LOT of pages,
> but of reasonable size for web browsers to load.

Sounds like a good plan as well, though that’s indeed a lot of web pages
for that rusty CVS repo to handle…

Medium-term, I think we should consider a solution involving pages
generated on the fly server-side, with a caching proxy (nginx!) in front
of it.  We’ll have to seek assistance from the gnu.org web masters, but
ISTR they were not against that idea.

Thanks!

Ludo’.