Fix (beta): remove unnecessary .distinct() dominating document list queries (#13205)

DocumentViewSet.get_queryset() carried a blanket .distinct() left over from
an older query shape (predating the version-file feature and the
correlated-subquery rewrite of num_notes/effective_content). Nothing in the
current base queryset can produce duplicate document rows: select_related
is all FK-to-PK, and the permission filter is a boolean id__in predicate,
not a join. id (the PK) is also always selected and inherently unique, so
.distinct() was a structural no-op for correctness.

It was not a no-op for cost. EXPLAIN showed it forcing a full sort-then-
dedupe over the entire permission-visible document set before LIMIT could
apply -- 340k rows for a 25-row page, with the effective_content/num_notes
correlated subqueries re-executed once per row as a result. This was the
dominant cost behind the original report's document overview slowness,
well beyond the get_user_can_change N+1 fixed separately.

Removing it isn't safe on its own, though -- auditing found two existing
filters that rely on an M2M join *without* deduping themselves, previously
papered over by the blanket .distinct():
- InboxFilter: a document with two tags both flagged is_inbox_tag=True
  (nothing prevents that) would be returned twice for ?is_in_inbox=true.
- CustomFieldsFilter: a document with multiple custom field instances
  matching different OR-ed branches would be returned once per match.

Fixed both locally, matching the pattern ObjectFilter already used for
tags__id__in/custom_fields__id__in. Added regression tests for both --
confirmed they fail without the local .distinct() calls.

Benchmarked against the same 400k-document/1,000-tag corpus: document list
wall-clock for a permission-restricted user drops from ~15.8s to ~2.25s
(~7x), closing most of the previous gap to a superuser's ~1.8s.

Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Trenton H
2026-07-23 07:22:46 -07:00
committed by GitHub
co-authored by Claude Sonnet 5
parent be40356d2e
commit 02c6b5f3e4
3 changed files with 72 additions and 3 deletions
+8 -1
View File
@@ -1063,9 +1063,16 @@ class DocumentViewSet(
.values("count"),
output_field=IntegerField(),
)
# No .distinct() here: nothing in this base queryset can produce
# duplicate document rows (select_related below is all FK-to-PK;
# permission filtering is a boolean id__in predicate, not a join).
# M2M-based filters that *do* introduce a join (e.g. tags__id__in)
# already call .distinct() themselves where they need it -- see
# ObjectFilter.filter(). A blanket .distinct() here forces the
# database to fully sort and dedupe every visible document before
# it can apply LIMIT, which is disastrous at scale.
return (
Document.objects.filter(root_document__isnull=True)
.distinct()
.order_by("-created", "-id")
.annotate(effective_content=Coalesce(latest_version_content, F("content")))
.annotate(num_notes=Coalesce(note_count, 0))