az acr repository show-manifests very, very slow

[DonMartin76]

For larger repositories in an ACR, the Azure CLI command az acr repository show-manifests is extremely slow. While show-tags is fairly quick (under 30 seconds), show-manifests sometimes takes several minutes to finish. In some cases, I had to cancel the request after almost 30 minutes.

Granted, those repositories have never been cleaned up (see issue #82), and that's what I am currently trying to do. Some repositories have several hundred tags, and as such also an amount of manifests in the same order of magnitude.

Still, this seems to be too slow. Is this a known issue, is there something one can do about it?

Addendum: It seems as if it's really the call to GET //v2/_acr/<repository>/manifests/list?n=20 which is really slow for certain of the larger repositories. This means I currently can't really clean things up efficiently. For the smaller repos, it works, but there seems to be some kind of O(n^2) thing in here (or even worse) which makes it too slow for repos having lots of manifests.

[SteveLasker]

Hi @DonMartin76 ,
The changes for perf and ordering are in flight. We believe the alpha ordering that docker supports as the default experience is insufficient beyond discovery. But, we've heard complains that we are currently random, and should be consistent with docker by default. We will be adding the ability to sort by the date a tag was updated. You'll be able to specify asc or desc ordering with paging. Without digging too deep into the sausage factory, we need to release the server side and az acr changes. It will likely be the end of the month, likely mid May before these are rolled out for public consumption as we're batching these with some other changes that are in flight as well.

[DonMartin76]

OK, thanks for the heads up. I need to find a different solution for the time being then - I have let it sit for two hours now, and it still didn't answer the request. I guess it's cut off somewhere in the backend.

[SteveLasker]

We'll make sure this particular manifest listing api gets fixed in our next deployment. We can shim it over the new metadata services that improve perf. It should be out by ~23rd.
Hopefully the current api you're running doesn't take that long to return... Sorry. We've been working on the metedata api to fix the indexing for a bit as we've seen latency become a problem. You're just a front runner. We'd love to have you in the preview.
Steve

[DonMartin76]

Thanks for your efforts, looking forward to the performance improvements. Registered for the preview.

[DonMartin76]

There seems to have been a fix, or at least a change for this - it actually returns data now. Can you confirm that you have rolled out a fix?

[sajayantony]

There have been a large number of fixes and improvements being rolled out -
/cc @yuwaMSFT2 @djyou

[sajayantony]

Feel free to reopen if we see performance degradation.

[DonMartin76]

This is sufficiently fast now. Sorry for not closing this myself earlier.

[SteveLasker]

No worries. Just happy we were able to resolve. Thanks for taking the time to post the info. If you have any other feedback, please do reach out.
Steve