Android "slow_platform" per page setting

[graham-martin]

I’m currently working on an integration with the Discourse API which pulls a list of the most recent topics and we’ve noticed that on Android devices each request is loading 15 posts per page as opposed to the 30 on all other device types.

After a brief dig around I can see that we’re treating requests with a user agent containing “Android” as a slow platform, and that the per page setting changes based on if the request is coming from a slow platform.

This leads me to a couple of questions:

• Is there a particular rationale for triggering this for all Android devices but not iOS devices?
• Is the concern the slowness of the device itself or the mobile network connection?
• I can see that at one point this was a configurable option within the admin which got removed way back in 2014. Is the thinking behind this primarily around the performance implications with how easy that configuration could lead to huge requests if the limit is set too high or to a huge number of small requests if the limit is set too low? Or am I missing some further subtly to the decision?
• Finally, is this the right place to be asking this question or have I missed some documentation/history on this?

Any insights on this would be appreciated! Thank you

[david (David Taylor)]

I think these should answer your questions:

The State of JavaScript on Android in 2015 is... poor

For several years now we’ve tracked the fact that, over time from 2012 onward, Android JavaScript performance has become wildly divergent from iOS JavaScript performance. And not in a good way. To give you an idea of how divergent it has become, try: http://emberperf.eviltrout.com Complex list Ember 1.11 This is the benchmark most representative of Discourse performance, and the absolute best known Android score for this benchmark is right at ~400ms on a Samsung Galaxy S6. That doesn’t seem …

We finally did something about Android Performance

The good news is, it’s getting better:

The State of JavaScript on Android in 2015 is... poor

Good news! In the last year things have gotten a lot better! Snapdragon 835, Android / Chrome circa June 2017 [snapdragon 835 ember and speedometer] Snapdragon 845, Android / Chrome circa June 2018 [snapdragon 845 ember and speedometer] Note this is Speedometer 1.0 to keep the comparison apples to apples. Between the respectable hardware bump (finally) and major Chrome/Android JS improvements, we’re looking at 2x improvement. Vastly overdue… but I’ll take it! This is finally iPhone 6s t…

[graham-martin]

Thank you David, those links are very useful and give some great background.

Very reassuring to see the performance being taken seriously. Will be interesting to monitor how things continue to evolve in that space.