6 years later and I’m curious about a lightweight entry point too. I’m not the admin of our Discourse forum but do most of the support question triage.
3 days ago, I hit my monthly data cap and was throttled. For the next 3 days I was essentially banned from the site. The screen would sit on the 1st blank screen with the 5 progress dots in a seemingly endless loop.
Fortunately, I had maillist mode enabled in my account preferences. So I could continue to respond to visitors.
The troubleshooting question above regarding whether gzip was running is intriguing. The site suddenly had a progress dots animation a couple months ago and initialization lage went from a 4-count to more than double that.
Is there a simple test to determine if the server is delivering gzipped content? Or how much data is being passed?