Poor, Edmund W wrote:
If it's not too much trouble, could we do the
watchlist without string comparisons? I bet a table like this speed things up:
user_id article_id
------- ----------
[..]
Would this work?
How hard would it be to implement?
For the most part it would be very straightforward; I didn't implement
it when it was first suggested because I wasn't sure how to get the
associated talk pages to come up in the list easily. This is a key
feature of the watchlist and I didn't want to break it without recourse.
We could add them to the wacthlist table along with the main pages when
a user adds a page; but if the talk page is created later, we'd have to
go update everyone's watchlists on page creation. (Hmm, could work.)
Using namespace and title instead of cur_id would make it more
straightforward, but wouldn't give the advantage of automatically
preserving a page in the list after a page move. (Though, we could
easily issue an update on page move that way.)
How much would it help?
Somewhat, particularly for the small but promiscuous few who have very
very long watchlists.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)