Temporarily disable author page facets to see perf impact

[cdrini]

We were seeing high bot traffic to this page, resulting in solr strain across the whole site. Turning off the facets (i.e. the subjects/places/etc) in the sidebar of the authors page, and we seem to be doing much better. They're still hitting us and traffic is 1.5x normal, but we now seem to be able to weather it.

We want to turn these back on, but make them lazy load similarly to the facets on the search page.

Technical

Testing

Screenshot

• A: when the high traffic began
• B: When this PR was patch deployed

Stakeholders

[Copilot]

Pull Request Overview

This PR disables facet fetching for author book pages by setting facet=False in the Solr query and updates the template to check for the existence of facet_counts before rendering subject sections.

• Disabled facet fetching in the get_books() method to improve query performance
• Added defensive check in the template to prevent errors when facet data is not available

Reviewed Changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

File	Description
openlibrary/plugins/upstream/models.py	Changed facet parameter from True to False in the works_by_author call within Author.get_books()
openlibrary/templates/type/author/view.html	Updated condition to check both books_count and books.facet_counts before rendering subjects

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[Copilot]

The condition checks for books.facet_counts but this is redundant with the backend change that sets facet=False. Since facets are now disabled in the backend, this entire subjects display section (lines 169-173) will never render. Consider removing this code block entirely or documenting why it's being kept if there are plans to re-enable facets in the future.

[cdrini]

@jimchamp notes this is likely causing this error on testing: