Questions on slowness & caching

[bryankaplan]

I’m brand new here, so please forgive me if I’m missing an obvious answer to this question. I don’t know anything about gcalcli’s architecture.

1. I auth’d and ran gcalcli agenda. It worked, but was quite slow.
2. I thought, “perhaps after init I didn’t give it enough time to populate the cache.”
3. So I tried running gcalcli agenda again, and again it’s quite slow. It feels like it’s hitting the network each time.

By “quite slow” I mean it takes over five seconds.

Am I wrong to expect the data to be cached, and the cache to be updated in the background?

Is there a known way to get a snappy response?

[bryankaplan]

Edit 2: I’m pretty sure my hypothesis that caching’s broken was wrong.

My train-of-thought on the incorrect hypothesis

My current impression is that gcalcli has a builtin cache, yet hates caching:

• The cache is not populated unless --refresh is explicitly called.
• --nocache defaults to True, meaning that even if the cache is populated it is unused.
• It is impossible to set --nocache=False, as an error is raised.

Please tell me I’m missing something. I don’t understand why there’s no daemon that manages caching and notifications on an ongoing basis.

Edit: I misunderstood, at least partially. use_cache defaults to True (source). Nonetheless the cache seems unused, as all commands take at least five seconds.

[bryankaplan]

It’s possible the cache is actually in use, and I mistakenly attributed the delay to network activity.

Am I wrong to expect that the agenda should be computed in advance for fast lookups, so when we request agenda the amount of computation required is near zero? I wonder if the five seconds are spent iterating through the cached events to select matches on the fly.

[bryankaplan]

Reading the code, I think the chief problem is the design decision to cache only raw events and compute everything on the fly.

IMHO (and again I’m new here, so please feel free to rebuke me), a daemon should:

1. Periodically cache upcoming events according to a stored preference for the preferred window, so that commands like agenda and remind are speedy.
2. Run remind periodically according to stored preference.

While a cronjob can workaround the missing reminder feature, there is no workaround for the missing precomputation of upcoming events.

A relevant consideration is the cache format. Have y’all tried using SQLite? It would at least provide for indexing events for faster matching. Still, I would expect this improvement to result in a slightly shorter unnecessary delay.