Search-as-you-type is slow (don't spam the backend with incomplete queries)
Especially when you have large addressbooks (perfect benchmark: enable your GNOME NextCloud account's Contacts, you'll get all GNOME foundation members showing up in GNOME Contacts!), typing in the search field is super slow if you don't type fast enough (but even if you type fast), because it starts launching a query immediately when you type the first character, which is absolutely wasteful.
Two optimizations I can recommend here:
- Require at least 2 characters before launching a search, though you might get into trouble with east-asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean...
- Wait longer before triggering a search, like what I am proposing in gnome-calendar#1170 (closed)
If you are open to the 2nd approach, I would be happy to contribute a one-liner patch that fixes this. I can guarantee it will make things better for pretty much everybody, from my experience doing this in other apps.