i'm using web2py on gae and creating a system that will incorporate friending and a friend feed of sorts. earlier this year, i made "friends" a list in the auth_user table, but upon watching brett slatkin's talk on list properties (http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=AgaL6NGpkB8), i got nervous because gae dereferences all lists every time you access a record. i left the list as it was for now, but i figure it's time to revisit.
there's a thread here: http://groups.google.com/group/web2py/browse_thread/thread/58d0d754d354c90f/ed79a35ab1559862?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=gae+inherit#ed79a35ab1559862 that discusses child properties. but as it's stated, it seems that the child property is pulled with the parent property, which means to me that the dereferencing happens there too. does anyone have enough experience with gae to know how this will work at scale? if i have an auth_user record that has 500 friends, will i be killing performance? if i have a "feed" table where each row has a list of friends that row belongs to (enabling me to call "db(db.feed.friends.contains(userid)).select()"), will that be effective or absolutely kill it? if anyone has done this other ways, i'd love to talk about it. i know issues of gae many-to-manys have come up often, but i still don't feel that there's a simple answer yet. matt
