is the default gcTime of 5 minutes too long?

[thomasballinger]

With @convex-dev/react-query the default gcTime of 5 minutes [edit: maybe] isn't appropriate because it means continuing to receive updates for a query for 5 minutes. This could be a problem especially if e.g. subscribing to a new query on keystroke, but even in normal cases it's potentially a lot of extra function executions for queries that update frequently.

[thomasballinger]

Maybe two solutions are needed:

1. change the default: convexQuery() should use a gcTime of 30 seconds?
2. limit how many subscriptions to retain? We've talked about doing this per hook, when the arguments of a useQuery() hook change that should immediately invalidate the old one.

[thomasballinger]

The argument in the other direction is generally TanStack Query has more aggressive defaults (like refreshing every query when the tab becomes active again) and once you start to tweak for performance and costs you dial these down, so something aggressive is nice. And that this way global changes to the default gcTime will be reflected in queries https://tanstack.com/query/latest/docs/framework/react/guides/important-defaults#:~:text=By%20default%2C%20"inactive"%20queries,1000%20*%2060%20*%205%20milliseconds.

[mez]

I think a decent stop gap is to update the document with a Defaults section that describes the use case and let the user think about changing the gcTime! What "cache" actually means etc.

[thomasballinger]

Here's where that might go, plus the README here https://docs.convex.dev/client/tanstack-query#differences-from-using-fetch-with-tanstack-query