Given how frequent these records are created, every vote by a user, I think it is important to study and review how it works.

The current design of lemmy_server 0.18.3 is to issue a SQL DELETE before (almost?) every INSERT of a new vote. The INSERT already has an UPDATE clause on it.

This is one of the few places in Lemmy that a SQL DELETE statement actually takes place. We have to be careful triggers are not firing multiple times, such as decreasing the vote to then immediately have it increase with the INSERT statement that comes later.

For insert of a comment, Lemmy doesn’t seem to routinely run a DELETE before the INSERT. So why was this design chosen for votes? Likely the reason is because a user can “undo” a vote and have the record of them ever voting in the database removed. Is that the actual behavior in testing?

pg_stat_statements from an instance doing almost entirely incoming federation activity of post/comments from other instances:

• DELETE FROM "comment_like" WHERE (("comment_like"."comment_id" = $1) AND ("comment_like"."person_id" = $2)) executed 14736 times, with 607 matching records.

• INSERT INTO "comment_like" ("person_id", "comment_id", "post_id", "score") VALUES ($1, $2, $3, $4) ON CONFLICT ("comment_id", "person_id") DO UPDATE SET "person_id" = $5, "comment_id" = $6, "post_id" = $7, "score" = $8 RETURNING "comment_like"."id", "comment_like"."person_id", "comment_like"."comment_id", "comment_like"."post_id", "comment_like"."score", "comment_like"."published" executed 15883 times - each time transacting.

• update comment_aggregates ca set score = score + NEW.score, upvotes = case when NEW.score = 1 then upvotes + 1 else upvotes end, downvotes = case when NEW.score = -1 then downvotes + 1 else downvotes end where ca.comment_id = NEW.comment_id TRIGGER FUNCTION update executing 15692 times.

• update person_aggregates ua set comment_score = comment_score + NEW.score from comment c where ua.person_id = c.creator_id and c.id = NEW.comment_id TRIGGER FUNCTION update, same executions as previous.

There is some understanding to gain by the count of executions not being equal.