Suggestion: reduce unnecessary API calls

[ingria]

Typesense driver makes a lot of unnecessary requests to the server. Real life example: I have a collection with over 10000 documents in it. Each document is updated hourly. Each update changes one model attribute, which triggers 2 request to typesense server. That's 5.5 completely unnecessary requests per second.

20k documents will cause 11 requests per second, 100k documents - 55 requests per second.

I know that typesense server is fast and performant, but still, that requests congest the bandwidth, tcp connections and other resources.

1. Unnecessary updates

At the moment, typesence-driver updates the document on any model update, even if the changed field is not in the schema. This can cause performance problems if there are a lot of updates.

For example:

// MyModel.php

public function toSearchableArray(): array {
    return [
        'id' => (string) $this->id,
        'name' => $this->name,
    ];
}

public function getCollectionSchema(): array {
    return [
        'fields' => [[
            'name' => 'id',
            'type' => 'string',
        ],[
            'name' => 'name',
            'type' => 'string',
        ]],
    ];
}

Now, when I update any field in my model, typesense-driver will try to update the remote index:

MyModel::first()->update([
    'some_field' => 'test',
]);

// typesense-driver sends GET to /collections/my-model
// typesense-driver sends POST to /collections/my-model/documents/import

MyModel::first()->update([
    'some_date' => now(),
]);

// typesense-driver sends GET to /collections/my-model
// typesense-driver sends POST to /collections/my-model/documents/import

My suggestion is to check if the changed fields are in the schema before updating the document. For example, using the getChanges() model method.

The problem that I see here is how to handle computed attributes (ones that use appends array and getter function).

2. Unnecessary collection info retrieval

Upon every update, typesense driver makes a GET request to retrieve a collection info.

I suggest getting that info from schema (getCollectionSchema method).

Metadata

Typsense Version: 5.0

OS: Ubuntu 20.04

[sergey-laradev]

@ingria the bug fixed and merged here: #42

Thanks for reporting this.