101496 - Use relative bug numbers for storing 'last query' info.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Query/Bug List, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Currently, the "BUGLIST" cookie that gets stored uses colon delimited bug numbers.

Instead of using bug numbers, it would be far more efficient to store only the
first bug number and store the rest as relative bug numbers.  For example, first
10 the bugs in my last query (All bugs reported today) are:
101281:101282:101283:101285:101287:101288:101289:101290:101291:101292

This can be shortened to:

101281:1:2:4:6:7:8:9:10:11

In the worst case scenario, where the first bug listed is # 1 we won't be any
worse off than we are now, with a potential for saving a few bytes here and
there (bug 100 will be expressed as 99, 1000 as 999, etc).

Advantages to this include increasing Bugzilla's "little mind" and reducing HTTP
transmission time for the average case. It will take less time to send the
cookie and less time for the browser to send it back.

Also on a semi-related point, why do we delimit that cookie with colons and not
commas?

From discussion on IRC, we also need to figure out if we are going to continue
to store this data in a cookie or in a new DB table/column.  DB storage seems
likely but if it isn't going to happen anytime soon, this could be worthwhile to
get done before that happens, IMO at least.

Comment 1

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Hmm, why not be more ambitious?

This only uses ten different characters.  Why not use hexadecimal, base 36, or
even all printable characters?

Or why not pack a bunch of 4-byte integers together, do differential huffman
compression, and map onto the printable characters?

Comment 2

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Instead of doing this, we're just going to stop using cookies to store bug lists and store them in the database instead.