Empirically, this helped my server considerably when handling gaps in Matrix HQ. The problem was that we would repeatedly call have_seen_events for the same set of (50K or so) auth_events, each of which would take many minutes to complete, even though it's only an index scan.
Part of #9744
Removes all redundant `# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-` lines from files, as python 3 automatically reads source code as utf-8 now.
`Signed-off-by: Jonathan de Jong <jonathan@automatia.nl>`
The idea is that in future tokens will encode a mapping of instance to position. However, we don't want to include the full instance name in the string representation, so instead we'll have a mapping between instance name and an immutable integer ID in the DB that we can use instead. We'll then do the lookup when we serialize/deserialize the token (we could alternatively pass around an `Instance` type that includes both the name and ID, but that turns out to be a lot more invasive).