Testing http://meta.discourse.org as opposed to https is adding a half sec delay for no good reason. I can confirm that time to first byte is quite high here on fastly, will raise it with them and figure out why.
Avatars are not impacting rendering of the page, we specify sizes, you can filter them out if you wish with webpagetest rule and confirm.
Looking at this: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140927_QB_7BH/
We are seeing a load time from clean of 4.5 secs.
Repeat view is taking 2.4 secs.
In the repeat view.
Browser has all the data it needs 420ms in, so the extra 2 seconds there are used up by:
- Parsing JS bundles (approx 500ms)
- ES6 module Loader (approx 250ms)
- Rendering the front page in ember (approx 500ms)
- Other stuff, approx 750ms
Definitely a lot we can do better, @eviltrout is working on the ES6 loader Regressions in Ember's loading due to ES6 modules - Performance - Ember.JS
Our mid term plan is to lean up our assets a lot and load up more on demand, I am hoping to halve the payloads at least. Which could get the down to 250ms.
We also plan to upgrade to metal views in Ember 1.8 which are more efficient and will give some sort of perf improvement.
We plan to focus a lot of efforts to improve perf in Discourse 1.2 (which is the next major release after the upcoming 1.1)
Perf is not terrible but we are doing way better than median, however we can do better and will.