h/t @official-techsupport again for finding another optimization.
We are now cumulatively at about 70% speedup over original.
It remains one of the hottest paths of the codebase in relative
terms, but its absolute performance demands have decreased enough
to buy us potentially substantial time on it.
h/t @official-techsupport for digging into the regex performance and
coming up with one that greatly reduces backtracking. We see an
approximately 2x speedup under typical loads, which proves to be a
major overall savings in performance. Previously, censor_slurs was,
second to ORM DB accesses, by far the most time-consuming function
in the codebase under typical loads. It's still not ideal, but it is
much better.
Future options to improve this critical path further would be:
1) Precompute a slur-replaced HTML, rather than recomputing
each pageload. Storage is cheap.
2) Tokenize the HTML and replace plaintext words using O(1)
exact-match lookups to a dict.
The reddit mentions system contained much duplicated code and was
grafted onto the post thumbnail pipeline to achieve semi-regular
invocation. Instead, we now run it through the new cron system,
and the duplicate code has been refactored out.
Adding an empty __init__.py, the imports-only cli.py, and setting
FLASK_APP in the environment are enough to get the `flask` command
to work. This will enable future changes, including database
migrations.
The proximate reason for the fix is to add a `flask cron` command
to run scheduled tasks within the application from cron. Specifically,
the lottery should be run from cron.
Previously, the three instances of 'Report[s]' and one instance of
'Coin[s]' in the UI templates were always pluralized, even when they
referred to a singular instance. This has been corrected by creating
a `plural` helper macro.
Additionally, this was used as impetus to create `utils/helpers.html`
to eventually move more recurring template logic into macros.