Only download index + WASM when someone actually searches

[itamarst]

Hi,

Making some progress getting going, and it looks like WASM is 400KB, index for my site is 600KB (gzipped it's 200KB, so hopefully CDN will shrink it down to the latter). Even so, this is still a bunch of downloads for someone who isn't actively using search, and it seems like both get downloaded automatically even for users who aren't searching.

There's some work that could be done to shrink the WASM, I imagine, based on the tinysearch writeup (https://endler.dev/2019/tinysearch), but also it would be nice if download of WASM + .st file only happened if user clicks in the search box. At that point the cost of using Stork to most users is just the cost of the stork.js.

There are many places where a 1MB download is quite expensive (https://a4ai.org/new-mobile-broadband-pricing-data-2018), so it would be nice to minimize unnecessary downloading.

[fauno]

Just to add that the wasm file can be compressed down to 93K (not sure if ls is using KB or KiB) using brotli -9. The site I tested has 600 articles and produced a 5.5M index, maybe it can be "sharded"? For instance having a small index that points to subindices, splitting them by first character.

Even though it's interesting to have the full index for offline searchs :)

[jameslittle230]

I wonder if it's possible to delay the stork.register() call until someone hovers or focuses in the input. That should be possible from within user-space if you want to do this today, though I could also create a configuration option in the register method to delay any downloading until the user hovers or focuses.

This wouldn't affect the WASM download (I'd have to do that within Stork), but it would delay the index download, which might help.

Either way, this is definitely a good idea, and I'll look into this further.

Thanks!
James

[jameslittle230]

Hi all - I'm going to close this issue as solved when #131 is merged. #131 will add some new API methods to the Javascript stork object that lets you control when the WASM is downloaded, when the index is downloaded, and when the DOM elements are captured, all from within your JS surface. This would let you add a hover listener to some part of your page and hold off on making any network requests until that listener is triggered.

I'm hoping that this new API will get published in version 1.1.0.

Let me know if this doesn't work for you (though I think it will!) and we can continue the conversation.

Thanks,
James