Helm serach gives up on small strings

[volhovm]

Hi!

This is a copy of issues that I have with both rifle and ql: alphapapa/org-rifle#67, see my last comment there.

Basically, sometimes, when the request is too heavy, helm refuses to proceed, as if it times out. And this seems to be reproducible in a very weird way, with bare emacs even. Does anyone have any idea of how I could debug it?

[yantar92]

See #160.

[alphapapa]

Copying my comment from alphapapa/org-rifle#67. However, perhaps #160 will help here. If so, maybe that could help with org-rifle, too.

Hi,

Thanks for your patience. I overlooked this issue until I saw the one you filed on org-ql.

It's hard to say what's causing this, but it's probably in Helm rather than in this package. I've occasionally seen similar issues, but they seem rare, and since it's hard to reproduce, I'm not very concerned about it, to be honest. I hope you understand. :)

Something that might help would be to increase the minimum input size. Searching for only one or two characters in a large file, returning many thousands of results, is not generally going to be very useful, anyway.

If you do want to dig into it further, you'll have to dig into Helm, and you'll have to be specific about versions and such. However, IME it's hard to debug this kind of issue, because, e.g. if you use Edebug to step through instrumented code, the problem tends to disappear. And the pseudo-asynchronous way that Helm handles results from Emacs functions like the ones in org-rifle and org-ql (rather than external processes) makes the code flow harder to follow.

Since it's not clear that this is a bug in this package, and there's likely not a lot that we can do about it, I'm going to leave this open as a discussion. And I'll copy this comment on the org-ql issue. Let me know if you have more findings.

Thanks.

[volhovm]

This seems to be solved in Emacs 28.1 automatically. I'll reopen this if it reappears.

[alphapapa]

This seems to be solved in Emacs 28.1 automatically. I'll reopen this if it reappears.

Please be more specific.

[volhovm]

I upgraded emacs (from 27 to 28.1) and the issue disappeared. Now helm-org-ql and the analogous rifle helm function work as expected. That is when I type just a few letters the helm actually pauses and does the search (computationally intensive apparently). While before it would abort after a trying for a second or so, and return no results.