I'm putting together teaching material for using AnnotationHub, and I noticed it takes some time to do some searches edit: using display(ah). For example, species: Homo sapiens, and global search for "chip-seq". After putting in "chip-seq" it takes 30-50 seconds on my machine. Putting "chip-seq" in the Description field takes 10-15 seconds for me, similarly "peaks" in the tags field. I guess this just has to do with more things being added to AnnotationHub (I feel like it was faster when I've tried it in the past). My suggestion is that it would help to have a visual indicator that it's "working", so that users know to let the browser sit while it's looking for records.

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.4.0 (2017-04-21)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X El Capitan 10.11.6

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.4/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] parallel  stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  utils     methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] shiny_1.0.4          AnnotationHub_2.8.2  BiocGenerics_0.22.0  BiocInstaller_1.26.0 rmarkdown_1.6      
[6] testthat_1.0.2       devtools_1.13.2     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Rcpp_0.12.11                  AnnotationDbi_1.38.1          knitr_1.16                  
[4] magrittr_1.5                  IRanges_2.10.2                xtable_1.8-2                
[7] R6_2.2.1                      stringr_1.2.0                 httr_1.2.1                  
[10] tools_3.4.0                   Biobase_2.36.2                DBI_0.6-1                   
[13] withr_1.0.2                   htmltools_0.3.6               yaml_2.1.14                 
[16] rprojroot_1.2                 digest_0.6.12                 interactiveDisplayBase_1.14.0
[19] crayon_1.3.2                  S4Vectors_0.14.3              curl_2.6                    
[22] mime_0.5                      memoise_1.1.0                 evaluate_0.10               
[25] RSQLite_1.1-2                 stringi_1.1.5                 compiler_3.4.0              
[28] backports_1.1.0               stats4_3.4.0                  jsonlite_1.5                
[31] httpuv_1.3.3    

We made some changes to AnnotationHub display that seems to help with the speed of searches.  We are still investigating solutions to adding a progress/busy notification.