[katello-devel] Content views operations optimization

[Ivan Necas]

Hi,

I've started using content views quite heavily recently and waiting for
various operations to finish made me think if the waiting is really
necessary for most of the operation.

I might be wrong, but it seems to me, that the only expensive operation
should be publishing of a new version of a content view: this time
new repositories are created with content that was not anywhere before.

Other operations with content views don't modify any content:

Content view promotion
----------------------
We basically just copy existing repos without changing their content,
therefore:

* computing metadata is useless, as we have the very same metadata
  already in the original repositories of the content view version
* indexing the repositories is useless as it should be just the same as the
  index for the original repositories of the content view version

Composite content view publishing
---------------------------------

I wonder what operations really need to be performed here? It seems to me,
that it just references the sub-content-views, not bearing any info about the
content itself (guessing form the fact, that promotion of a composite means promoting
the sub-content-views). Still, it takes 10 minutes to publish it with real-world repos
(RHEL, EPEL, katello)


Am I missing something here, or we are really able to reduce the metadata calculation and
indexing to the content view publish phase and the rest should be really just about copying
symlinks (which could also be optimized heavily when learning Pulp how to create a repository
simply by symlinking another one)

-- Ivan