apollo-client Scalability when many `useQuery` are used

Intended outcome: Using the same useQuery throughout many components should have relatively low performance impact.

Actual outcome: Long task is created when rendering components with many useQuerys.

How to reproduce the issue: Reproduction Repo

Versions

  System:
    OS: macOS 12.6
  Binaries:
    Node: 14.18.3 - ~/.nvm/versions/node/v14.18.3/bin/node
    Yarn: 1.22.17 - ~/.nvm/versions/node/v14.18.3/bin/yarn
    npm: 8.10.0 - ~/.nvm/versions/node/v14.18.3/bin/npm
  Browsers:
    Chrome: 107.0.5304.121
    Firefox: 99.0.1
    Safari: 16.0
  npmPackages:
    @apollo/client: ^3.7.1 => 3.7.1

Nov 30 '22 23:11 dkempner

@dkempner Thanks for posting this issue. I was curious, what are you using to show that network latency diagram? I just cloned your reproduction and was taking a look at this problem.

Dec 01 '22 18:12 jpvajda

@jpvajda it's not network latency it's 300ms of CPU time (mosly from Apollo's cache), since in the template repo all data is local to the Apollo cache.

I use chrome devtools "Performance" tab

Hit "record" button and then click the "Click Me" button in my reproduction app, then hit stop recording.

Dec 01 '22 22:12 dkempner

I reproduced this with Firefox Developer edition as well.

Dec 02 '22 17:12 jpvajda

@alessbell I'm curious if you had any thoughts on what might be occurring here? cc @bignimbus

Dec 02 '22 17:12 jpvajda

(sorry to interject)

My guess is it's probably interacting with the cache often. #10270 mentions the cache as a bottleneck with useQuery and I suspect this is in the same ballpark.

Dec 02 '22 17:12 jerelmiller

Yes it's definitely all about InMemoryCache's performance. We found a few bottlenecks, especially in writes where broadcastWatches iterates over every watcher on the page for every write.

It became a problem such that we needed to build a DocumentCache replacement which is not normalized and only handles caching at the query + variables level. This allows us to not broadcast so widely when new data is written to cache.

In my reproduction repo's example, it's not cache writing that causes pain (because there isn't any in this app), it's mostly just the initialization of ObservableQuerys.

The reason this is important to me is that Apollo claims that it can be a state management library. If you use it naively like a React context it doesn't scale terribly far. You need to build abstractions on top of it to cache data in other ways.

Dec 04 '22 08:12 dkempner

makeCacheKey-latency

I've encountered similar scalability issues when using a large amount (around the scale of thousands) of useQuery hooks pointing to the same few query documents and variables.

In this repro, I set up 2000 useQuery hooks using the same query, resulting in a full minute's wait on my device (using Chromium 113.0.5672.126) before the React application finishes updating. ~14 seconds are devoted to React updates, while over 30 seconds are spent calling InMemoryCache.makeCacheKey. I suspect that this is due to the Trie used to create cache keys getting stuffed with a massive amount of unique argument keys from the watch objects associated with each useQuery application.

I've set up a branch on my apollo-client fork that seeks to address this specific scenario by making all QueryInfo watch callbacks referentially consistent and deduplicating maybeBroadcastWatch calls by watch-derived cache key. This helps greatly reduce Trie size in InMemoryCache.makeCacheKey and reduces the number of times maybeBroadcastWatch gets called (up to a factor of the total number of useQuery hooks used) in the event that a large amount of duplicate useQuery hooks are used.

Jun 08 '23 04:06 Hsifnus

Hi @dkempner, you mentioned building a DocumentCache alternative, which disables document normalization and should thus improve performance there. Is there any chance you could open-source this? I think a non-normalizing in-memory cache would be a good alternative for people running into this issue. Thanks!

Edit: it seems like here is the file: https://github.com/dkempner/simple-cache/blob/main/lib/DocumentCache.ts Thanks for making this available!

Jan 16 '24 19:01 puehringer

we traced down heavy apollo use as causing cpu spikes and significant performance impact:

the following functions stood out in traces (no source maps, so i don't have the source in apollo yet)

processSelectionSet which lives in @apollo/client/apollo-client.cjs
"store merge" which lives in @apollo/client/dev/dev.cjs.native.js
themeMap which lives in @stitches/react/types/index.d.ts
broadcastWatches from @apollo/client/apollo-client.cjs

Jul 18 '24 18:07 earonesty