Lots of `/profile` requests from Android clients

Whenever a new user joins a big room like Matrix HQ, we see lots of GET /_matrix/client/r0/profile/<userid> requests from Element-android useragents. But all the information that the client needs should be in the join event (indeed, the “profile” probably isn’t even what you want, since users may have different displaynames/avatars in different rooms).

What is the reason for these requests?

[bmarty]

When the Android SDK detects a membership event, it forces a fetch of the user profile, to mitigate issue of outdated User data. The Sync response does not contain information about the user profile, but just room member, and user can change their profile data per room. That said we had a bug which is currently been fixed, we where fetching several times the same profile data. This will be fixed in the release 1.4.36 by this commit: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/pull/6917/commits/a7666e2112ee6ec957d1972def10b83f1d4e3662

If this is happening when a user send a message, this is probably another bug. Please confirm.

By the way it’s good to see such issues coming from server maintainers. Thanks!

[bmarty]

…make /profile request every time there is an m.room.member

We make a profile request if the m.room.member data differs from what is stored locally, to ensure an up to date local DB. Also previously User info was kept up to date using the data received with the Presence information (display name and avatar), but since this is disabled on matrix.org, we had to find a (or rather another!) workaround.

Ideally profile information changes would come in the sync response, but this is not the case.