Low-bandwidth "lite" version

Feature
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So a couple of my users are complaining that my site loads slowly when they’re on a slower connection or have bad reception and/or uses too much “data” on their mobile devices. My site loads fast for me so I don’t really think it’s an issue on our side/server, but I usually have a good connection and LTE coverage on my mobile devices.

Would it be possible to have a “lite” version of the site that’s more basic and uses less data so that it ‘loads’ faster for people with a slow connection and/or limited data? Something like the “basic HTML” version on gmail.

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It’s already pretty light.

The main discourse page without any caching already done is 882KB.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/ability-to-follow-and-friend-other-users/1584

Which has a notible amount of avatars, with the initial cache blown out too, is 1.1MB.
Keeping the cache present and browing around, posts such as
https://meta.discourse.org/t/ability-to-follow-and-friend-other-users/1584
Was all of 11.6KB.

The initial load is obviously where the largest ‘hit’ comes in, but since it’s a 1 time thing, and the posts being quite small, I don’t think much work could really be done to improve their ‘persistent’ experience.

Have you had them do traceroutes to see if it’s definitely the stack that is causing the issue and not a routing issue?

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As covered in other topics, this is a non issue… the first load sends the Discourse JavaScript app to their browser. All subsequent calls are tiny. But the Discourse app needs to be sent over the wire to render anything.

The only downside is if you have a lot of drive by one-and-done users, they incur the full app load but do not reap any of the subsequent benefits when clicking or tapping around in the loaded app.

We are discussing having a super light weight 1996 era read-only HTML crawler view available to massively obsolete 2011 and earlier devices, but it is unlikely your users will have a device that old.

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Curious about 2 data points here:

  1. What Phones are they using?
  2. How often are you deploying?
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The majority of my user base isn’t very tech savvy so I don’t think they’d be able to…

I guess we could disable the avatars and some extras on the mobile version, but would hate to remove those features for the users on modern mobile devices with fast connections.

I think this is probably the main problem we have. They try to load the site on an already slow public wifi and figure that something must be wrong with our site…

One of our users did say they were stuck on an < 2G connection for a couple of days and had to give up on the site, so this could be an option for those unfortunate times.

I think the ones that have been vocal about the slowness are on some older and/or low-end android devices.
We’re updating the site about once or twice every two weeks.

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