Very complex FQL queries very slow - facebook

Question

I'm trying to get the first 50 posts (posts by friends) from the user's news feed using facebook FQL, as well as each friend's profile information. I have two queries, which total 10 seconds of processing:
SELECT actor_id, message FROM stream
WHERE filter_key IN
(SELECT filter_key FROM stream_filter WHERE uid= me() AND type='newsfeed')
AND actor_id in (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me())
LIMIT 50
This query returns the user, even if the message is "" (I couldn't find a NOT operator to filter out rows that have "" as a message)
Second query:
SELECT pic_big, name,url from profile WHERE id IN
(SELECT actor_id, message FROM stream WHERE filter_key IN
(SELECT filter_key FROM stream_filter WHERE uid= me()
AND type='newsfeed')
AND actor_id in (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me()))
LIMIT 50
I've tried other ways to get the data (quicker) however, it returns it in a random order (facebook doesn't guarantee that the data comes out the way it went in).
I could place a "loading" animation on my website but I'd prefer not to because I think that this can be optimized but I'm not sure how.
In the past, I used the graph api but I had to process the results myself, and it was very inefficient (taking over 30+ seconds).

Answer 1

For these two queries, you should be able to speed things up quite a bit by combining them into a single multi-query, especially since your second query includes your first query. This one is the most complex, and if you're sending them in separate API calls, Facebook has to perform it twice.
{
'q1':"SELECT actor_id, message FROM stream
WHERE filter_key IN
(SELECT filter_key FROM stream_filter WHERE uid= me() AND type='newsfeed')
AND actor_id IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me())
LIMIT 50",
'q2':'SELECT pic_big, name, url, id FROM profile WHERE id IN
(SELECT actor_id FROM #q1)'
}
Your two queries take 4072 + 1304 = 5376ms when I run them in the Graph API explorer. The multiquery takes 3475ms. With network latency eliminated from running two separate queries, this should drastically speed up your app.
You can filter out blank messages by adding AND strlen(message) > 0 to the WHERE part of your first query.
You can use ORDER BY column to force the return of data in a specific order, but there is no guarantee that you will get all the rows in your result.