[dev] Links API + performance

[Bo Daley]

hi all,

I've been looking at the Links API a bit recently trying to see if there's any
scope for improving performance. The performance seems to start to become a
problem when there are a large number of links being processed at once.

An example of this would be in Whups, where you might have a module linked to
(say) 500 different clients from Turba.

If we wanted to get a listing of all the clients attached to a module, at
present Whups has to go through a process like this:

* get all the links for this module from the Links API
* unserialize all the Turba object IDs from these links one by one
* get the names for each client from Turba's API one by one

this works ok when there are only 2 or 3 clients attached to a module but
doesn't scale too well.

can anyone think of a better way to approach links between objects in different
apps (while still keeping them nice and generic)? In the meantime I'll keep
trying out some more ideas...

bo.