Rich Media parsing was previously handled on-demand with a 2 second HTTP request timeout and retained only in Cachex. Every time a Pleroma instance is restarted it will have to request and parse the data for each status with a URL detected. When fetching a batch of statuses they were processed in parallel to attempt to keep the maximum latency at 2 seconds, but often resulted in a timeline appearing to hang during loading due to a URL that could not be successfully reached. URLs which had images links that expire (Amazon AWS) were parsed and inserted with a TTL to ensure the image link would not break.

Rich Media data is now cached in the database and fetched asynchronously. Cachex is used as a read-through cache. When the data becomes available we stream an update to the clients. If the result is returned quickly the experience is almost seamless. Activities were already processed for their Rich Media data during ingestion to warm the cache, so users should not normally encounter the ...