Getting random pages very slow

[gebeer]

Hello,

Getting random pages with

$oldPosts = wire('pages')->find('template=post, shown=1, limit=100')->findRandom(16);

works fairly good. About 500ms

But without the limit=100 it takes more than 6 seconds.

There are only 60 pages with template post but it will be thousands when the app is live.

Is there a more efficient way of getting random pages?

[LostKobrakai]

sort=random in the selector should work.

[gebeer]

Thank you for the suggestion.

With something like

$oldPosts = wire('pages')->find('template=post, shown=1, limit=16, sort=random')

would PW get the first 16 pages it finds and then sort them randomly or would it go through all post pages and get 16 randomly selected pages?

I'd need the latter.

[LostKobrakai]

I've not used it, but I'd imagine it doing the latter. Should not be to hard to test out. If the resulting pages to change it's the latter.

[gebeer]

I just tested and it is doing exactly what you imagined and I need. Thanks again!

EDIT: forgot to mention that it also is much faster

[LostKobrakai]

It should be as it's using mysql to sort randomly instead of loading data into the runtime memory.

[SiNNuT]

Hello,

Getting random pages with

$oldPosts = wire('pages')->find('template=post, shown=1, limit=100')->findRandom(16);

works fairly good. About 500ms

But without the limit=100 it takes more than 6 seconds.

There are only 60 pages with template post but it will be thousands when the app is live.

Is there a more efficient way of getting random pages?

If there are only 60 pages i find it strange that it would take more than 6 seconds to get a couple of random pages. It's also funny that your limit 100 is larger than the actual number of pages, but it is twelve times faster (500ms versus 6 seconds) when you put the limit the selector. I'm not sure what is going on here.

Apart from that, as LostKobrakai said, when getting random pages from a large number of pages the sort=random is preferable. However, when you would get into a really big number of pages even that would probably become slow.

(i've done some simple tests in the past: https://processwire.com/talk/topic/8626-multiple-random-ads/?p=83345 )

[gebeer]

@SiNNuT thanks for the input. I just ran into this while testing and set the limit value to 100, 200 and 300 just to see what happens.

I will definitely limit the pages for the life site.