TYPO3 Core

One of our clients has a TYPO3 website with thousands of pages (2,665 active pages plus 502 hidden and 2,298 deleted for a total of 5,465).

If a backend user starts typing in the page tree search input and isn't fast enough (e.g. they manually copy a page UID from their notes), the query for a single character is sent while the user keeps on typing. With the large amount of pages in the pages table this takes a while, naturally. In the roughly 1.5 - 2 seconds it takes for that query to come back, the query for two characters and subsequently three characters are all fired and come back earlier, leading to a brief glimpse of the desired search result which is then overwritten by a different tree that is neither the unfiltered page tree nor any of the search results.

I have been able to reproduce this with v11, v12 and v13. In 13 the performance is even worse because after a one character search on that page table, the frontend takes on the order of 10 seconds after the AJAX result comes back to stop the spinner and display something.

My preferred solution would be to have a way to configure the behavior of the page tree search. Either define a number of minimum characters that a query needs (who searches for just one character?!) OR add a switch (user preference maybe?) that the query is only sent on an explicit Enter.