Users discuss slow performance of Discourse on older Android devices, particularly a 2013 Samsung S4. lkwg82 reports ~11s render times on forum.syncthing.net, noting CPU spikes and preferring the JS-less version. Falco suggests performance issues are expected on early 2013 hardware and questions real-device vs. emulated test results, referencing Discourse’s 2015 JS perf report. lkwg82 shares WebPageTest results comparing meta.discourse.org, try.discourse.org, and forum.syncthing.org, noting forum.syncthing is fastest — zogstrip humorously attributes this to geographic proximity. Falco adds real-device testing shows ~7s load time. codinghorror notes Android/Chrome JS performance improved by 1.5x–2x by 2017, and Snapdragon 845+ devices (2018+) rival iPhone 6s/7 performance, though older devices will linger for ~4 more years. sam finds even a $50 Android usable now, and Falco praises his $299 Pocophone F1 (Snapdragon 845) for smooth browsing. codinghorror confirms Snapdragon 845+ is solid for Discourse. Later, Shaneod reports recent slowdowns on Android Chrome despite being up-to-date and without proxies; codinghorror suggests checking for Brotli→Gzip fallback bugs (even without CDNs), while Shaneod confirms no CDN/proxy and only uses an inactive ad plugin.
Hi,
I experienced some (for me serious delays) in the rendering performance. For example this thread in the syncthing forum: SSL Certs discovery v4 vs v6 - General - Syncthing Community Forum.
I use the chrome on samsung s4.
(screenshot of developer tools), rendertime ~11s, without js ~1s (at home over wlan)
Thx in advance!
I can be wrong but on a early 2013 phone, with 1.5GHz processor this is bad but kinda expected?
How is the timing loading meta.discourse.org and try.discourse.org ?
This phone has been 3years ago an high end phone. What is the phone distribution here on this site? Maybe there are less powerful phones.
Mobile design is IMHO not only about the responsive layout. It is also about speed/bandwidth and hardware limitations on these devices.
You can see there is timerange with 100% cpu.
P.S. forum.syncthing is the fastest
Well, you have to take into account the speed of light here.
You are comparing the speed between Frankfurt 
San Francisco and Frankfurt Amsterdam.
This tests are using the chrome emulation, and not real devices too.
http://mobitest.akamai.com/m/results.cgi?testid=160330_9W_3E
This gives 7s with a cold cache.
Discourse is working on improving this:
ok, so you know about. I currently switched to the js-less version. At this point an app makes sense … a lot!
As of October 2017, JS perf in Android / Chrome is substantially improved, probably 1.5x - 2x speedup.
As of June 2018, Qualcomm has semi-competitive (iPhone 6s territory) hardware with the Snapdragon 845. It looks like their new release coming in 2019, the Snapdragon 855, will be close to iPhone 7 performance.
We do have to wait for the vast bulk of old Android devices to cycle through the market, unfortunately. I expect that will take another 4 years.
I find my really dodgy 50 dollar android somewhat usable these days
For example I’m rocking a Pocophone F1 which costs $299, has the Snapdragon 845, and it’s a breeze to browse Discourse using it (I do it everyday 
)
Anything at Snapdragon 845 level or higher is going to be very solid for Discourse.
i have a few users on android phones using the chrome browser complaining of slow site loads, only very recently, one since the last upgrade only. Anything changed which might effect this?
Make sure you are on latest, if you are behind a reverse proxy or any other weird proxy like cloudflare, there was recently a bug that prevented fallback from brotli to gzip from working. And that’s excruciating given the resulting payload file size..
Everything up to date and no CDN or proxies involved. Working fine on my iPhone with safari. Anyone else having similar issues? Only plugin i have is the ad one and I’m not even using it currently.
