The State Changers meeting revolved primarily around resolving an issue in an application where a system started to time out after modification to a function's implementation. The function stack, which was used to perform specific tasks based on certain records, was modified to include a 'lookup' function in order to eliminate repetitious and unnecessary data clearing and re-downloading in the platform Xano.
The problem was, after the implementation of 'lookup', the system began to time out. The team identified that the system was needing to scan through a significant number of records each time the new function was invoked, causing the timeout. This was happening because the lookup was based on a 'unique ID' which lacked an 'index', thereby making it time-consuming to find related records due to the absence of a proper reference. The team decided to create a new indexed field with 'unique ID' in the database to speed up the record search process. The concept of database indexing was also discussed, specifying how indices can slow down record writing but substantially speed up record reading. Therefore, they could be strategically important for large data sets to optimize reading operations while not excessively affecting the write operations. While creating the index would take some time due to the size of the table, the team was hopeful that this change would lead to performance improvement. Future follow-ups were scheduled to track the impact of this change.
(Source: Office Hours 9/30 )
