Discourse slow loading on dedicated server

[P_O]

I have discourse installed on a dedicated server and it loads so slow when the index page is set to load latest posts. The server is fully managed, with hardly anything running, other sites on it load super fast.

Here are some Matomo page performance metrics using Categories/Top posts as the index page:

19/3/24 2.66s Total load time
20/3/24 1.66s
21/3/24 3.88s
22/3/24 1.85s
23/3/24 1.48s

Now switched to Latest posts index page:
24/3/24 17.92s Total load time
Avg DOM Processing time 5.55s
Avg DOM Completion time 11.81s

25/3/24 5.62s
Avg DOM Processing time 1.91s
Avg DOM Completion time 3.21s

26/3/24 13.94s
Avg DOM Processing time 2.33s
Avg DOM Completion time 9.94s

[merefield (Robert)]

Some good discussion on the topic of page load here:

Discourse Loading Time

Nature of the beast; we are a JavaScript application, so the app has to be delivered to the browser. It is a bit like if you were measuring smartphone app startup times, including the time spent to download and install the app from the app store as part of the “startup” time. What isn’t shown is that subsequent page loads are blindingly fast in Discourse because the app is loaded in the browser, and we only send API calls and json (the data necessary to render the page) down the wire.

Same still applies. It’s a javascript based app. There have been some innovations since then though.

Google crawl doesn’t see the javascript speed.