ffa124d0d5
While investigating a customer-reported issue, I found that some emails
were appearing late in Chatwoot. The root cause was query timeouts.
It only happened for emails with an in_reply_to header. In these cases,
Chatwoot first checks if a message exists with message_id = in_reply_to.
If not, it falls back to checking conversations where
additional_attributes->>'in_reply_to' = ?.
We were using:
```rb
@inbox.conversations.where("additional_attributes->>'in_reply_to' = ?", in_reply_to).first
```
This looked harmless, but .first caused timeouts. Without .first, the
query ran fine. The issue was the generated SQL:
```sql
SELECT *
FROM conversations
WHERE inbox_id = $1
AND (additional_attributes->>'in_reply_to' = '<in-reply-to-id>')
ORDER BY id ASC
LIMIT $2;
```
The ORDER BY id forced a full scan, even with <10k records.
The fix was to replace .first with .find_by:
```rb
@inbox.conversations.find_by("additional_attributes->>'in_reply_to' = ?", in_reply_to)
```
This generates:
```sql
SELECT *
FROM conversations
WHERE inbox_id = $1
AND (additional_attributes->>'in_reply_to' = '<in-reply-to-id>')
LIMIT $2;
```
This avoids the scan and runs quickly without needing an index.
By the way, Cursor and Claude failed
[here](https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/pull/12401), it just kept on
adding the index without figuring out the root cause.
Co-authored-by: Muhsin Keloth <muhsinkeramam@gmail.com>
Chatwoot
The modern customer support platform, an open-source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc.
Chatwoot is the modern, open-source, and self-hosted customer support platform designed to help businesses deliver exceptional customer support experience. Built for scale and flexibility, Chatwoot gives you full control over your customer data while providing powerful tools to manage conversations across channels.
✨ Captain – AI Agent for Support
Supercharge your support with Captain, Chatwoot’s AI agent. Captain helps automate responses, handle common queries, and reduce agent workload—ensuring customers get instant, accurate answers. With Captain, your team can focus on complex conversations while routine questions are resolved automatically. Read more about Captain here.
💬 Omnichannel Support Desk
Chatwoot centralizes all customer conversations into one powerful inbox, no matter where your customers reach out from. It supports live chat on your website, email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, SMS etc.
📚 Help center portal
Publish help articles, FAQs, and guides through the built-in Help Center Portal. Enable customers to find answers on their own, reduce repetitive queries, and keep your support team focused on more complex issues.
🗂️ Other features
Collaboration & Productivity
- Private Notes and @mentions for internal team discussions.
- Labels to organize and categorize conversations.
- Keyboard Shortcuts and a Command Bar for quick navigation.
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- Auto-Assignment to route conversations based on agent availability.
- Multi-lingual Support to serve customers in multiple languages.
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- Live View of ongoing conversations for real-time monitoring.
- Conversation, Agent, Inbox, Label, and Team Reports for operational visibility.
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Detailed documentation is available at chatwoot.com/help-center.
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