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by tristan9 1743 days ago
As I said, it's not so much that we ask that data to be fetched -- it is there in the first place, and pulled from Elasticsearch, not a SQL database

Because of this model, we also make sure that Elasticsearch merely works a search cache, not as an authoritative content database (hence everything we add in there is considered public, on purpose, and what isn't meant to be public is just not indexed in ES)

However the gzip efficiency improvements would be really neat for sure

Fwiw I also don't work on the backend and there might be good reasons to not expressly filter out data (yet anyway, perhaps it will end up as a separate entity and be a include parameter)

2 comments

I have to say I'm glad this is being talked about in a public forum. Outsiders rarely get to see brainstorming, troubleshooting & group discussion of technological issues like this.

Someone who is focused on the performance aspect & someone who is focused on stack stability discussing the real world input & output of a business system and showing why performance & UX are not the only metrics that matter is a good thing for us to see.

You can query Elastic for specific fields only: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

Edit: As you said, there may be reasons on the backend not to filter things out of the query. Though it seems likely that the web response could be trimmed down.