The fire-and-forget prefetch had a fundamental race: React renders all
NoteCards immediately when the feed query resolves, before the prefetch
has a chance to populate the cache. Each card's useAuthor call finds an
empty cache and opens its own relay subscription — 20+ concurrent REQ
messages per relay, which hits subscription limits and most fail silently.
The only reliable fix is to await the prefetch inside the queryFn before
returning items. This ensures ['author', pubkey] is in cache for every
pubkey on the page when React renders the cards. useAuthor finds fresh
data and never opens a relay subscription.
Authors and stats are fetched in parallel (Promise.all), so the extra
latency is max(author_time, stats_time) not their sum. With eoseTimeout
at 500ms this adds ~500ms per page — a worthwhile tradeoff for reliable
author resolution vs the broken fire-and-forget approach.
Co-authored-by: shakespeare.diy <assistant@shakespeare.diy>
shakespeare.diy
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