Question

Using active_admin, I am witnessing slowness with respect to loading an index for a model that has many records. I am not sure that this related to the other reported cases of slowness.

2011-11-10 13:26:14 rails[35848]  INFO: Started GET "/admin/articles" for 127.0.0.1 at Thu Nov 10 13:26:14 -0800 2011
2011-11-10 13:26:14 rails[35848]  INFO: Processing by Admin::ArticlesController#index as HTML
2011-11-10 13:26:14 rails[35848]  DEBUG: AdminUser Load (0.3ms)  SELECT "admin_users".* FROM "admin_users" WHERE "admin_users"."id" = 1 LIMIT 1
2011-11-10 13:26:14 rails[35848]  DEBUG: Article Load (381.2ms)  SELECT "articles".* FROM "articles" ORDER BY publish_date desc, guid desc, "articles".id desc LIMIT 30 OFFSET 0
2011-11-10 13:26:14 rails[35848]  DEBUG: SQL (0.5ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "articles"
2011-11-10 13:26:14 rails[35848]  DEBUG: CACHE (0.0ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "articles"
2011-11-10 13:26:14 rails[35848]  DEBUG: CACHE (0.0ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "articles"
2011-11-10 13:26:21 rails[35848]  DEBUG: PendingArticle Load (6602.8ms)  SELECT "pending_articles".* FROM "pending_articles" ORDER BY created_at desc
2011-11-10 13:26:41 rails[35848]  DEBUG: Domain Load (1.0ms)  SELECT "domains".* FROM "domains"
2011-11-10 13:26:41 rails[35848]  INFO: Rendered /Users/sorens/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p299@rails3/gems/activeadmin-0.3.4/app/views/active_admin/resource/index.html.arb (27605.5ms)
2011-11-10 13:26:41 rails[35848]  INFO: Completed 200 OK in 27645ms (Views: 20629.0ms | ActiveRecord: 6985.8ms)

this was a request for /admin/articles. my article model has a belongs_to :pending_article. pending_article has has_one :article, :autosave => true.

I have a few questions

(1) Can I prevent this additional query? I am not accessing any field in any pending_article from the index view of article. it seems that the article query is correctly scoped by pagination but the follow-on query to pending_article appears to grab them all.

(2) why does the render of index.html.arb take 27+ seconds if it is just showing 30 records?

I am using Ruby 1.8.7-p299, Rails 3.0.5 and active_admin 0.3.4. The above output is from my development environment (it takes even longer on Heroku). In the above example, I had 10,708 articles and 17,648 pending_articles.

Answer 1

By default the form includes a filter for each attribute, which means it is trying to create a nice popup for all your pending articles. Instead of just using the default, try defining the filter list with:

ActiveAdmin.register Article do
  filter :title
end

And just be sure to skip the pending_articles. That should prevent it from loading all those records.