Patterns: "My patterns" are missing

[daria2303]

Quick summary

My patterns are missing in the editor. Classic theme, simple site, I cannot reproduce on a test site
https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/assets/11535091/e9d98dd7-34a9-4231-923e-7334ab0816f9 but it looks like it is account specific because all user's sites have this issue. User mentioned that it started happening after the change to where you can select “edit original” on the pattern

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to the post or page editor on that user's account (info in the ticket 7693912-zd-a8c)
2. Try to find "My patterns" item

What you expected to happen

I see "My patterns"

What actually happened

"My patterns" item is missing

Impact

One

Available workarounds?

No but the platform is still usable

Platform (Simple and/or Atomic)

Simple

Logs or notes

7693912-zd-a8c

[github-actions]

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

• 7693912-zen

[liviopv]

📌 REPRODUCTION RESULTS

• Tested on Simple – Uncertain
• Tested on Atomic – Uncertain

📌 FINDINGS/SCREENSHOTS/VIDEO

• I couldn't reproduce on my sites using the TextBook theme

• On https://onevoicebecametwo.life/, "My Patterns" is not showing up. When I tried to create two patterns on this test page, it took several minutes to register the pattern, even though both had a single Paragraph Block in it. Even after creating a pattern, the "My Pattern" link still doesn't show.

• Going https://onevoicebecametwo.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=wp_block (WP Admin view for patterns, not accessible without direct link) shows the site has a whopping 635 patterns but only 435 posts which makes me question why are they even using Patterns? Either way, I guess that the number of patterns is causing a delay/failure in fetching the My Patterns link and the patterns across the site.

• On the user's other site - mounteverestoftheobvious.com - after I created a pattern, the "My Patterns" item showed up:

User mentioned that it started happening after the change to where you can select “edit original” on the pattern

I believe this has been introduced in the recent GB versions with Pattern Overrides.

📌 ACTIONS

• Triaged

📌 Message to Author
@daria2303 in future cases of isolated issues where there's no clear repro or indication of a widespread issue, a post on happinessfeedback is a better way to approach it.

[liviopv]

@glendaviesnz @talldan do you think this could be an edge case where the number of patterns present on the site might be causing performance issues in searching, listing and creating patterns?

I also noticed in some of the user's patterns that have patterns inside them https://onevoicebecametwo.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=130108&action=edit - could that be an issue?

[glendaviesnz]

@liviopv it is hard to debug this on the user's site as no console errors showing. Is it possible to get a site export of this site so we can run it locally and add extra debugging - i tried running the export option but it doesn't work for that site with my permissions, and I also wasn't sure if we need the user's permission before getting a copy of their data for testing?

[talldan]

@glendaviesnz @talldan do you think this could be an edge case where the number of patterns present on the site might be causing performance issues in searching, listing and creating patterns?

I wouldn't rule it out as the user does have a lot of patterns.

Having said that, the views are paginated to prevent issues like this. Perhaps that isn't working as expected.

[talldan]

It looks like the server request for fetching patterns (formerly reusable blocks) fails due to a timeout after 2 minutes:

I did some testing on the users site, opening up a post and running some commands in the console to fetch patterns, and I noticed that the requests are very very slow.

A request for even 20 patterns took around 7 seconds (which seems a lot), triggered via:

wp.data.select( 'core' ).getEntityRecords( 'postType', 'wp_block', { per_page: 20 } )

Now this user might have unusually large patterns. Or they might have one pattern that is causing an issue.

I think you'll require someone to debug the server performance (that's not really something @glendaviesnz or I can help with).

I believe this has been introduced in the recent GB versions with Pattern Overrides.

Given it's a server issue, it's very unlikely this is the cause of the problem, as the pattern overrides work hasn't involved any changes to the way patterns are stored or fetched (that I know of).

[supernovia]

Shall we ask about exporting for experimentation? Noting too this user said when the problem started:

I can say for certain that this started happening after your change to where you can select “edit original” on the pattern (which was a great addition—as some overlap caused some confusion for me when I first started using them). I’m fine with them now because I’m careful not to let them bleed into each other, but I think the new feature is the better design.

[glendaviesnz]

Shall we ask about exporting for experimentation?

If you were able to get an export we would be in a better position to help debug, if not, as Dan noted above a dotcom engineer can probably help narrow down the issue as it is definitely server side, not in the editor itself.

[supernovia]

Thanks @glendaviesnz . It's a simple site, so I really hope we aren't having systems issues. My guess it's some limit the user is hitting with the way they've used patterns.

I've got permission as well as a zip file. I have passed it on to you.

[supernovia]

Also: the user says they'd like the opportunity to "delete" the patterns but have their content merged into the posts. I don't know if there's a plugin or function out there that could do that, similar to "convert to blocks" on old reusable blocks, but in bulk. I'm prompting for more info.

[glendaviesnz]

Thanks for the file @supernovia. I have downloaded it and removed the link.

[talldan]

I did some more testing with the zip file using a self-hosted version of WordPress (tested both 6.4 and 6.5), and had the same kind of issues. The REST API responses for patterns (/wp/v2/blocks) take a very long time.

My self-hosted version didn't timeout like WordPress.com does, though it did sometimes make the server unresponsive.

I think there are a combinations of issues:

• The client side code for the block editor fetches 100 patterns at a time, it also does so when the editor loads. Ideally the patterns would only be fetched from the server when needed.
• The REST API seems slow (if you request all patterns at once in the admin view, it's considerably faster for some reason, though possibly it doesn't fetch all the content from the database since only an excerpt of the pattern is needed).
• The user has lots of patterns.
• The user has some very large patterns.

[supernovia]

Did we change anything over the weekend, @talldan and @glendaviesnz ? The user says it's working fine now.

[talldan]

I don't think so 😄

[annezazu]

Considering the user said it's working okay now and we haven't heard anything further, I'm going to close this out. Of note, there was some recent work to fix a performance problems with patterns either way after 6.6: WordPress/gutenberg#64219 & WordPress/gutenberg#64871