Riot should ignore events it cannot process (IoT)

[turt2live]

Description

TL;DR: I made something that sent 43,200 custom events and Riot doesn't like me anymore.

Backstory: I started work on matrix-temperature-logger - a project to record basic weather data to a Matrix room for processing by other parties. The project uses a custom event (io.t2l.matrix.weather) to send this data to the room. Riot apparently tries to cache these events, despite it not knowing how to handle them, leading to some pretty significant degradation of performance as time goes on.

The project currently sends 1 event per second, and after 12 hours of run time that's ~43,200 events that have ended up in the room. The new indexeddb improvements help a lot with processing the thousands of events, however it still seems to reduce performance whenever I enter that room.

Each time I click on that room, I expect to see the few state events and couple messages that Riot can show me, however the spinner goes wild (flashing in and out of view) while it tries to load the thousands of weather events. As it loads more and more, the spinner gets slower and slower (and the UI gets less and less responsive). At the time of writing this, it takes about 5 minutes for Riot to show me everything in the room (see screenshot).

Note: I fully recognize that 43,200 invisible events is ridiculous and may even be abusing the intended use case of Matrix. However, I feel as though Riot should intentionally drop these messages from it's cache and pretend they never happened so the room is still usable as a communication room (which is what I was going for - people chatting with weather data silently being transferred without the participants noticing, unless you're the bot handling it all).

When trying to investigate what was causing the spinner to slow down, I found that Riot was generating DOM elements for each event like so: <li data-scroll-token="$14874408815468LsTzb:dev.t2bot.io"></li> - this is probably what caused the increasingly poor performance of the entire application (it also makes Chrome's dev tools very unhappy).

Steps to reproduce

• Have something that sends a plethora of custom events to a room
• Let that something run wild to generate tens of thousands of events
• Try and navigate to the room in Riot
• Note how the spinner behaves and performance degrades increasingly until it finishes

I do have a test room with these events available. Feel free to ask me (@travis:t2l.io) for an invite if you're looking to avoid the hassle of generating thousands of events.

Describe how what happens differs from what you expected.
I would have expected Riot to ignore the events that it can't handle, but it instead tried to create a timeline out of them.

Log: not sent (can't).

This is what the room looks like after it's done loading the tens of thousands of events:

Here's a snippet of the DOM inspector:

Version information

• Platform: web (in-browser)

For the web app:

• Browser: Chrome 56
• OS: Windows
• URL: riot.im/develop

[ara4n]

:D so, this isn't abusing Matrix at all - but we obviously haven't optimised for it yet.

@rxl881 this is relevant to your interests ;P

@lukebarnard1 i'm surprised that we're creating an actual EventTile for each of these invisible events - is this deliberate?

I think the correct solution however is to set up Riot to only sync event types it's comfortable with by default. (Although even this might pose problems for Synapse, which probably doesn't perform the filtering very intelligently).

[turt2live]

It appears as though Riot also thinks I have unread messages in the room (when "nothing" has happened). Although that might be related to the event tiles being created (unless I'm totally wrong on how this unread messages notification works).

[ara4n]

Thinking some more: we have a proposal for any event to have human-readable representation (including, for instance, your temperature events). This means that we'll need to extend the filter API to say "please send me all visible events".

It could also give you an alternative solution, which is to include human-representable forms of all the events, and then Riot would paginate them sanely and nothing would grind to a halt O:-)

[turt2live]

I would imagine adding a text component to each event would solve the "my browser is unhappy" problem, although it does mean that (at least in my case) the room would be essentially unusable as the bot would be sending "It is currently 24C in the room" constantly (drowning out legitimate messages).

The point of me sending a bunch of data constantly is to have some receiver in the room to process the data. For instance, this could be used to monitor the temperature of a server room - a bot could start pinging people if a temperature threshold is exceeded. Another case (which is actually what I'm working on) is to simply have a record of data to be able to look back on when requested (temperature over time).

Although I suppose this could be combated by having the processing bot in 2 rooms - a data stream room and the "notification" room.

[turt2live]

This seems to also affect riot-android (and probably riot-ios). I can't actually confirm it at the moment, but the room has a spinner at the top that seemingly runs forever.

[ara4n]

The vaguely expected model is that high-data rooms (if they have human representation of the events) should end up in their own room where they're not going to drown out humans. But we're muddling through this ourselves atm. @rxl881 was doing something similar last week and hitting the same probs (and also with rate-limiting).

[rxl881]

Thanks for the heads-up @ara4n, this is definitely relevant to my interests :)

That said, the issues that I was encountering last week were more to do with submission of messages from the client (IoT device) to Synapse, via the JS SDK (submission of the messages doesn't appear to have been a problem here).

@turt2live - I actually quite like the idea of "hidden" messages in the channel being monitored by the bot, but as Ara says, in the short term at least it's probably going to be best to have this high volume traffic in it's own channel. I'll have a chat with Ara and the Matrix team about this in more detail and will let you know if anything changes as we develop our plans and guidance for IoT communication on Matrix.

[lukebarnard1]

// if we aren't showing the event, put in a dummy scroll token anyway, so
// we can scroll to the right place.
ret.push(<li key={eventId} data-scroll-token={eventId}/>);

The above seems a bit pointless because you can't scroll to an invisible event.

We should still alter the filter used on sync because pagination appears to take longer when paginating through invisible events.

TODO:

• Don't spam the DOM with empty <li>. This has the disadvantage of loosing the ability to jump to the event using window.location. Do not push a dummy element with a scroll token for invisible events matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#718
• Filter /sync for events that will be displayed. This is already implemented via the JS SDK. Setting the filter option on startClient does the trick.
• Filter on pagination. This would require changes to the spec as filtered pagination is not a thing.

[lukebarnard1]

@turt2live has matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#718 helped at all?

[turt2live]

@lukebarnard1 better, although it still has some performance issues.

For instance, the same element keeps getting re-created so it slows down a little bit.

(highlighted elements indicate updates)

The spinner also still flickers, and takes forever, but that seems to be a different issue from what matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#718 intends to solve.

[lukebarnard1]

@turt2live It taking forever to paginate is expected because those events will still be paginated across. The re-creating is a bit odd. Perhaps MessageList shouldComponentUpdate needs modification.

[turt2live]

The majority of this has been fixed, although it's still sluggish in rooms with mostly iot activity. Some kind of filtering before the events land in react would probably speed up this process so it's not trying to filter thousands of events in the dom.

Also I've advertised the bounty on the OP.