Slow Neo4j query despite indices - performance

Question

Here I'm trying to find all Twitter users who are followed by and who follow any members of some group G:
MATCH (x:User)-[:FOLLOWS]->(t:User)-[:FOLLOWS]->(y:User)
WHERE (x.screen_name IN {{G_SCREEN_NAMES}} OR x.id IN {{G_IDS}})
AND (y.screen_name IN {{G_SCREEN_NAMES}} OR y.id IN {{G_IDS}})
RETURN t.id
But for the group G I sometime have their screen names and sometimes have their ids, thus the OR clause above. Unfortunately this query is long running and doesn't appear to ever return.
I have indices and constraints on both on both id and screen_name:
Indexes
ON :User(screen_name) ONLINE (for uniqueness constraint)
ON :User(id) ONLINE (for uniqueness constraint)
Constraints
ON (user:User) ASSERT user.screen_name IS UNIQUE
ON (user:User) ASSERT user.id IS UNIQUE
If I get rid of the OR clause (for instance if I happen to have all screen_names or all ids for group G) then the query runs quite fast.
I'm using neo4j-community-2.1.3 on a Mac. My graph has 286039 nodes, all of which have the User label.
And ideas to improve this? Otherwise I'll have to chop this up into 4 queries to get all possible combinations of members. This is really even more problematic because I really want to keep track of how commonly a user appears in a G-->user-->G relationship, and I'll need to do a lot of extra bookkeeping if the counts are spread among 4 different queries.
Update
I created an issue related to this: https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/issues/2834
I ended up using
MATCH (x:User) WHERE x.screen_name IN ["apple","banana","coconut"]
WITH collect(id(x)) as x_ids
MATCH (x:User) WHERE x.id in [12345,98765]
WITH x_ids+collect(id(x)) as x_ids
MATCH (y:User) WHERE y.screen_name IN ["apple","banana","coconut"]
WITH x_ids,collect(id(y)) as y_ids
MATCH (y:User) WHERE y.id in [12345,98765]
WITH x_ids,y_ids+collect(id(y)) as y_ids
MATCH (x:User)-[:FOLLOWS]->(t:User)-[:FOLLOWS]->(y:User)
WHERE id(x) in x_ids AND id(y) in y_ids
RETURN count(*) as c, t.screen_name,t.id
ORDER BY c DESC
LIMIT 1000
But this basically represents a hack to get around a place where neo4j isn't using the indices that it could be.

Answer 1

I guess the query does not make use of indexes due to the OR condition, you can verify by prefixing the query with PROFILE and run it in neo4j-shell.
If there's no notion of index usage, you might split the query up into two parts. The first one fetches the combined list of user ids, instead of the OR we do a UNION on two queries (each using a index lookup):
MATCH (x:User) WHERE x.screen_name in {G_SCREEN_NAMES} RETURN id(x) as ids UNION
MATCH (x:User) WHERE x.id in {G_IDS} RETURN id(x) as ids
On the client side, use the list of node ids as parameter for the next query:
MATCH (x:User)-[:FOLLOWS]->(t)-[:FOLLOWS]->(y)
WHERE id(x) in {ids} AND id(y) in {ids}
RETURN t.id
I've intentionally removed the labels for t and y with the assumption that you can only follow User and no other kind of nodes. This removes a unnecessary label check.

Answer 2

JnBrymn,
How about this query?
MATCH (x:User)
WHERE x.screen_name IN {{G_SCREEN_NAMES}} OR x.id IN {{G_IDS}}
WITH x
MATCH (x)-[:FOLLOWS]->(t:User)
WITH t
MATCH (t)-[:FOLLOWS]->(y:User)
WHERE y.screen_name IN {{G_SCREEN_NAMES}} OR y.id IN {{G_IDS}}
RETURN t.id
Grace and peace,
Jim