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Why is the Hexbear Emote Picker So Slow And What Is To Be Done (by me on my machine) About It? (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net
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FALSE ALARM, CULPRIT FOUND: I had a MalwareBytes browser extension that slowed the emote picker down. The extension has been purged and now both the popup and the inline picker are working well.

The original post before I did testingI try to fidel-salute in a Hexbear comment. The picture takes forever to even load in the picker so it takes a while to see if I've even selected the right emote. Most of the emotes in the list I can't even see the pictures unless I step away for a minute and come back after they've all loaded. I hit submit comment. It takes forever to post. I can hear the fans whirring. If I'm streaming vid on blorptube while posting something from the emote picker, sometimes the video will just pause and stop loading until whatever process the emotes have kicked off completes. I don't know why some emotes are visible while others aren't it doesn't appear to be related to order that they show up in the list

I think "Well I'm on the ESR of Firefox, maybe it's just old" but then I boot into Linux with cutting-edge up to date Firefox and it still behaves largely the same.

I have wondered if it's an internet speed thing but it seems to behave this way whether I'm on ethernet or 802.11n wireless, whether or not my VPN is on.

It also takes quite some time for emotes to load in the emote picker on Blorp, come to think of it.

I've got 16GB of RAM, that should be plenty. Yes I know the web has gotten more intensive since this computer was made 13 years ago but come on, compared to hell sites like twitter, facebook, and new.reddit, lemmy seems downright lightweight. NoScript and other blockers aren't blocking a ton of bloat here.

I'm not criticizing the unsung heroic devs of Hexbear. I'm no good at web dev, hated it when I had to do it for work, and couldn't fix or optimize this either. But I would like to understand what the root cause of this problem is and

(If the answer is "upgrade your hardware or live with it" then I'm living with it, because my precious little computer is my buddy and I'm not abandoning it)

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[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 26 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Because there are so many emotes that don't actually get used, that end up there because someone once thought "hmm I think I'll put that as an emote". This is not merely a problem with loading thumbnails, but with the idea of using them as a means of communication in general.

I'd love to see a list of how much each emote has been used, and especially which ones have been used less than 10 times.

Lol @ the suspicion that "you must have more than 16 GB of RAM to use this webb sight" tho

[–] Lussy@hexbear.net 22 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Didnt read allat, the emote library is the crown jewel of this site, this shit turned slow overnight.

One of you nerds did something, I know it, I need it fixed stat

[–] NephewAlphaBravo@hexbear.net 20 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

it's been laggy as shit for years, if it suddenly got worse recently i can't say i noticed

edit: i have noticed comments taking longer to go through after hitting send though, that's been happening for just a couple months i think. different issue but possibly related by the timeframe

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago

if they contain an emote they are slow, might be some image fetching mechanism

[–] LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago

I thought it was laggy on my phone and it is but actually what it was doing was loading the emoji picker way down the screen if i started typing characters too fast after the :

I'd been dealing with it by starting over and typing slowly which would have it appear in my view but now it's just like oh i guess i just have to scroll down

[–] CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net 16 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I'd love to see a list of how much each emote has been used, and especially which ones have been used less than 10 times.

Love that idea.

16 GB

Well comrade 9to5 has 32GB RAM and doesn't have this problem. Coincidence?

[–] Tabitha@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago

I didn't verify this with technology, but feels to me like you use almost your entire rate limit on the first page before it's possible to search anything, them if you don't find anything on your first search, nothing else bothers to load if it's not already loaded or cached. Hard to say it's for sure rate limit, but doesn't feel like a problem of slow device to me. Maybe the emoji menu should implement pagination? And/Or exclude emojis from rate limit?

[–] LeninWeave@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago

I disagree, the emoji are amazing, especially the obscure ones. I think this can probably be solved with a technical solution, like @makotech222@hexbear.net implemented.

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

I'd love to see a list of how much each emote has been used, and especially which ones have been used less than 10 times.

Someone give me a dump of the comments from the database.

[–] somename@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

if I could load all the emotes, maybe I'd try more of them lol

[–] WhyEssEff@hexbear.net 21 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

the problem (on the images side, less familiar with the codebase) is partly an optimization problem with some images that still need to be downsized after the refork. Day-ish of grunt work I haven’t found a slot for?

But yeah, I agree that there's also an issue with quantity in a sense, less raw quantity but more so the accumulation of amount of data you need to load. I've been much more hesitant to do large batches of additions recently and instead have been largely adding emotes on a one by one basis when I do so.

I have to find a time to assess what I can do on my end, unfortunately I have like 50 things going on ATM so oooaaaaaaauhhh

[–] Thordros@hexbear.net 16 points 2 weeks ago

If you can instruct me on what to do, I've got a gamer rig, funemployment time, some crude graphic design experience, and the power of autism available.

It's the least I can do to pay you back for that God of the Dead mega-mix I keep on my pump up playlist.

I would put a salute emoji here, but, well...

[–] CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net 12 points 2 weeks ago

@WhyEssEff@hexbear.net @Thordros@hexbear.net

I have some technical knowledge of python, unemployment, and autism, and I'd be interested in helping automate a downsampling procedure if we can come up with good logic for it. The fear I have is just running a 50% down sample on everything without sensible thresholding could break some images.

[–] LeninWeave@hexbear.net 10 points 2 weeks ago

I was thinking of this recently, and the other thing I noticed is that the emotes reload extremely often for me, even when I use them multiple times a day. Are they not configured to be cached? This might be an issue on my end.

[–] dragongloss@hexbear.net 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This is a crime against all hexbears and we must liberate every emoji from loading jail.

[–] roux@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago

No one is free until the Hexbear emojis are free.

[–] makotech222@hexbear.net 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I've pushed an update to lazy load all the images instead of trying to load them all immediately. Should help a bit with both the emoji pickers.

[–] CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

What is lazy loading? Test post: fidel-salute maduro-katana-1 shocked-dino

Alright I think that helps the in-line colon keyword colon method. Smiley face emote picker still behaves as before but this is a step up, thank you!

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago

Lazy loading means that the browser only starts loading once the image is needed. So before it was "eager", meaning it would load the images immediately, whereas now it will wait until they are actually shown.

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[–] LeninWeave@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

Wow, what a difference in speed! I thought it was already lazy loading, I didn't realize it was loading them all at once.

[–] gayspacemarxist@hexbear.net 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think the emotes need a better cache policy and possibly some pre fetching and more optimized lazy loading and cheaper thumbnails. I've done a lot of this type of work for like e-commerce sites, its annoying and tedious, but it is possible to make this type of thing fast on most devices.

I have intentions to help with hexbear tech, but I haven't got around to it yet.

[–] gayspacemarxist@hexbear.net 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Speaking of, is guthub the only way to contribute? Cuz I'm probably not gonna make an account on there.

[–] BoarAvoir@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

We could and have also accepted patches other ways (matrix primarily) but it's currently the primary place. I'd appreciate any contributions! If you are on matrix reach out to carcosa or me about getting added to a dev chat when/if you're ready

[–] D61@hexbear.net 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Most of the time, if I'm trying to post a comment:

  • I need to type everything in the comment box and click the submit button.

  • Select All and Cut everything out of the comment box while the hexbear logo is spinning in the submit box.

  • Click the Reload Page button. A little box with "Type Error" pops up at the bottom of the screen.

  • After the page reloads, paste everything back into the comment box and click submit. 90% of the time it works like a charm.-

[–] BoarAvoir@hexbear.net 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

This is concerning. It's certainly not ever been bulletproof but it shouldn't be failing out anywhere near every time (the Type Error is I think, expected when reloading while a request is in progress, but I'm assuming you reload because otherwise it never successfully posts?) Any further errors you can share? the developer console/network tab can show a lot of useful details but I'm not even sure where to start with this one. OS and browser details, I guess?

edit: and this comment posted pretty much instantly for me, using a firefox fork on a like 4 year old linux box

[–] blunder@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I posted in c/hexbear about this recently, several other users are experiencing this:

https://hexbear.net/post/6403209

[–] BoarAvoir@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks, I had missed that. Looks like a significant issue then

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[–] LeninWeave@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago

100% of the time if I open another Hexbear tab and wait for that to load (a long time sometimes), once it has my comment in the first tab will have also posted.

[–] userofnames@hexbear.net 11 points 2 weeks ago

true good posting takes time and patience

[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

i just have the entire emoji list memorized so i can always summon the perfect one at will and not even need to preview it. arm-L border-middle-horizontal-bl

[–] CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah I've been trying to do that but sometimes I want to browse for new emotes

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (7 children)

@Thordros@hexbear.net, @CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net You can find the repo that contains all the emoji here: https://github.com/Hexbear-Code-Op/hexbear-emotes and I think there is a full size and a reduced size folder contained within. You might want to look at imagemagick for bulk image conversion and resizing.

Though, it might be more that @WhyEssEff@hexbear.net needs to literally log in and manually re upload smaller versions of the emoji through this interface:


(this is from my instance)

And that interface is not great. Looking at it right now, I don't even think there is an option to "reupload" an emoji; you might have to delete it and re-add it, which I think is what the actual time crunch would be.

Now, all that said, if you wanted to go fucking ham on this issue, you could use the CustomEmoji endpoint: https://lemmy.readme.io/reference/put_custom-emoji to automate the process of Fetching, then Deleting, then recreating the entire emoji list. You would need to have the Emoji hosted somewhere on the internet for it to work, but, that could be the GitHub repo. I assume when you provide it the image URL it automatically pulls the image from the remote location to the Lemmy server.

So, in theory, there is a tool waiting to be built that would allow you to not only point your instance at an emoji GitHub repo and import it, but periodically sync the emoji from GitHub itself. Obviously, that's outside the scope of the issue here. What is needed is just a script that can replace the existing emoji with smaller versions, retaining their short code and other data.

Edit:

If you wanted to get a JSON object of our big, beautiful emoji list, it's here: https://hexbear.net/api/v3/site look under "custom_emoji". (2749 objects! Woof!)

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[–] MayoPete@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It would be really helpful if there was a page that listed all if the emotes so that I can tab over to it and have all of the options loaded for me to pick out.

I also like that browser extension idea 🤔

[–] CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net 10 points 2 weeks ago

Happy anniversary of joining Hexbear, Mr. Future President. If I might make one small request, as a constituent, would please consider making your next campaign slogan be "AmeriKKKa delenda est"?

[–] Marxism_Sympathizer@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

there used to be in c/emoji but the person who went through that effort deleted their account and those comments unfortunately

[–] jackmaoist@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Hexbear itself is slow for me unless I'm using an Lemmy app on my phone.

[–] CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

The entire internet is kind of slow for me on a computer unless I'm using an app on my phone.

[–] BoarAvoir@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

When you refer to the emote picker, do you mean the one that pops up when you start typing out the shortcode (e.g. :fidel ) or the one above the text input box under the little smiley icon?

Both have performance issues to some degree, but there probably isn't much you can do on your machine about it. Maybe there's some sort of extension that can force cache them? It's something we've tried addressing from the server side in the past with limited success, but it could use more work.

[–] CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I mean both. Here's a pic of what I see 2 seconds after clicking the smiley icon:

Here's a pic of what I see 2 seconds after typing ":fidel-" in this comment input field:

If there's nothing I can do about it because it's server side then there's nothing I can do about it. Ultimately it's a minor annoyance. I tried glancing through the Hexbear code on Github to see if I could try to diagnose the problem and all I got from it was a reminder that I am terrible at web dev.

[–] 9to5@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

So im not kidding when I say the emotes pop up almost instant for me but I also got a 32gb of ram and a pretty beefy rig.

EDIT : Im gonna say something controversial I LOVE our emojis/emoticons but I also think we probably have about 50% to many and should consider cutting down "some" of them to make it user friendlier

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[–] tocopherol@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I have the same issue, not local hardware related it seems because it's essentially the same on my phone, pc, whatever the internet speed or connection type is. If I was more saavy I would build a browser plugin that loads the emotes locally so you can see them quickly or something.

We just all need charts with each image and the corresponding code so we can be proper posters.

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago

I've thought of it too, perhaps something like LocalCDN. Adding a UI would allow one to potentially view and use the emojies outside of hexbear too.

[–] Dessa@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh sure, the pig shitting on its balls loads instanly though

[–] CommunistCuddlefish@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

From extensive reverse engineering and ux testing I have concluded that PPB is probably hard-coded as the first element in the emote list. It's the equivalent of letting us all carry with a round already in the chamber.

source:I did none of that and made it up

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[–] makotech222@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes i've also noticed it as well, especially lately. Might be something to do with caching and something to do with overloading requests to the server and pictrs.

I'm planning to dig much more into it once lemmy 1.0 drops, but its been taking quite a while. Sorry for the inconvenience on it.

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[–] stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Is the picker loading the full sized emojis or thumbnails of them?

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[–] XxFemboy_Stalin_420_69xX@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

ive just given up on using emotes tbh, i mostly post from my phone and trying to use the picker on it crashes the page most of the time

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