Lazy-import similar_talks to fix Gunicorn worker OOM on startup

[patrick91]

Summary

• Moves the import of reviews.similar_talks from the top of admin.py into the view function that uses it
• The module imports heavy ML libraries (sentence-transformers, bertopic, torch) at module level, which caused Gunicorn workers to OOM/timeout during boot and prevented the previous deploy from going live

Test plan

• Merge and verify the deploy succeeds (health check passes)
• Trigger the review recap analysis in admin and verify it still works

[vercel]

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
pycon	Building	Preview	Feb 9, 2026 2:17pm

[claude]

Summary

Moves the import of heavy ML libraries (sentence-transformers, bertopic, torch) from module-level to function-level in reviews/admin.py to prevent Gunicorn worker OOM during startup.

Issues Found

Testing - Test mocks need updating

The lazy import breaks existing tests. Currently, tests mock reviews.admin.compute_similar_talks and reviews.admin.compute_topic_clusters, expecting these functions to be imported at module level. After this change, the functions are imported inside review_recap_compute_analysis_view(), so they no longer exist in the reviews.admin namespace.

Affected tests in backend/reviews/tests/test_recap.py:

• test_recap_view_does_not_call_ml_functions (lines 111-112)
• test_compute_analysis_view_returns_submissions_and_clusters (lines 189-203)
• test_compute_analysis_view_passes_recompute_flag (lines 238-245)
• test_compute_analysis_view_no_recompute_by_default (lines 262-270)

Fix needed: Change all mock paths from:

• mocker.patch("reviews.admin.compute_similar_talks", ...)
• mocker.patch("reviews.admin.compute_topic_clusters", ...)

To:

• mocker.patch("reviews.similar_talks.compute_similar_talks", ...)
• mocker.patch("reviews.similar_talks.compute_topic_clusters", ...)

This will patch the functions at their source module instead of where they were previously imported.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 92.50%. Comparing base (3cbed04) to head (28e8f73).
⚠️ Report is 1 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##             main    #4569   +/-   ##
=======================================
  Coverage   92.50%   92.50%           
=======================================
  Files         355      355           
  Lines       10658    10658           
  Branches      812      812           
=======================================
  Hits         9859     9859           
  Misses        687      687           
  Partials      112      112           

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