Posted under General
Last I checked the blacklist had a 3900 character limit but now has no limit, and the tag limit for searches used to be 6 and is now 40 tags, right?
So a question for both:
1.) In the site's current form, does having a way-above-3900 character blacklist make a page load slower or faster at all?
2.) Does having a way-above-6 tag search bar do that?
I wasn't sure how the new system works. Thanks if you can answer :]
First of all, there is still a limit on the blacklist size - it's 150000 characters. It's much larger than the old limit, but it still exists.
Having an extremely large blacklist would slow things down, but it's not in any noticeable way. There are two steps to the process:
1. The script first iterates over the list itself, formatting it into a more usable format. A longer list would take longer to process but it still should be pretty fast under normal circumstances.
2. Then, it iterates over every single post on the page, determines whether the post matches the blacklist. If it does, the post gets hidden through CSS. This process is slower.
Fun fact - every time you toggle the blacklist filters in the sidebar, the script iterates over every single post once again. This is a problem for users who utilize userscripts that create an infinite scroll type of search, since the script would potentially have to iterate over thousands of posts, not hundreds. For normal users, it's not really an issue.
The 6-tag search limit was introduced because of performance issues. 40-tag limit is the normal mode of operations. From what I've seen, it should actually be faster than the old search.
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