Use Django's bulk create to improve notifications creation performance

[cbouvier15]

Hi there! 👋

I'm working on implementing a notifications sub-system for a project and because of that, I was analyzing in detail some parts of this great project.

So, when I saw the notify_handler method I noticed that, eventually, a bunch of notifications could be created and then saved within a for loop.

django-notifications/notifications/base/models.py

Lines 285 to 308 in 8dd1a5e

	for recipient in recipients:
	newnotify = Notification(
	recipient=recipient,
	actor_content_type=ContentType.objects.get_for_model(actor),
	actor_object_id=actor.pk,
	verb=str(verb),
	public=public,
	description=description,
	timestamp=timestamp,
	level=level,
	)
	# Set optional objects
	for obj, opt in optional_objs:
	if obj is not None:
	setattr(newnotify, '%s_object_id' % opt, obj.pk)
	setattr(newnotify, '%s_content_type' % opt,
	ContentType.objects.get_for_model(obj))
	if kwargs and EXTRA_DATA:
	newnotify.data = kwargs
	newnotify.save()
	new_notifications.append(newnotify)

Do you guys think it would be possible to make use of Django's bulk create instead of calling save at every iteration?

I can work on it if you think it worth it.
Thanks!

[pandafy]

I doubt that this will be viable, from Django docs:

The model’s save() method will not be called, and the pre_save and post_save signals will not be sent.