Low bandwidth users

用户体验
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Continuing the discussion from Make Discourse play nice with the Wayback Machine:

[quote=“codinghorror, post:7, topic:34579, full:true”]

Where are you getting this data from? [/quote]

Measuring from my own site on a text-only topic, no cache, I’m getting 4.3 MB. At 56k simulated speeds in Chrome dev tools, it churns for 15-20 minutes and times out, less than a quarter of it loaded. (I’m still trying to find out why my site is heavier than meta… ) I have yet to successfully load a page at this speed.

I’m not saying there are lots of dial up folks out there. But there are a few left, by choice or necessity.

Verizon inherited about 2.3 million AOL dial up customers, according to Time magazine. And 3% of Americans still use dial up at home, according to this research group.

On top of that, folks throughout the developing world have limited access speed and data caps - not to mention under-powered hardware. A simpler, lighter interface will open the door to them as well.

Obviously we aren’t catering to these folks… but since we already serve up an stripped down HTML version, making it functional will let them participate.

Here’s some other big sites that present a functional stripped down version.

Facebook now has “Facebook Lite”: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/04/download-facebook-lite/

Gmail has basic HTML: https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html

Twitter with javascript disabled redirects to https://mobile.twitter.com, and is functional.

Google Search with javascript disabled redirects to an older but functional version (and slims down from 362kb to 62kb).

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Is that without any form of built in HTTP gzip compression? That does not seem correct to me at all. Remember text compresses at 70-80% typically.

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Ah! Thanks for that… Turns out gzip was not working. We’re down to about 900kb now, and things are much more snappy!

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The irony is that Discourse, being a JavaScript app delivered over HTTP, is a best case performance scenario for a severely bandwidth constrained user. The first load will be the chunky, but all highly compressible, JS text of the Discourse app – and every subsequent request is for only the JSON data necessary to render the requested view.

At no point is a “new web page” send down in its entirety to the user.

But do not take my word for it. Feel free to measure it yourself – with a normal, gzip compatible http connection – and see.

(It is true that first load perf will not be amazing because we send the app in that first payload. But all text.)

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You might find this an interesting read:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/blog-post-is-high-bandwidth-required-to-read-a-discourse-forum/26995?u=erlend_sh

(please excuse the slightly aggressive language; it’s not directed at you! At the time of writing, there was a very vocal minority of people who were crusading against the advent of JavaScript as a web technology without presenting any factual data)

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6

After first load, Discourse is an exceptional low bandwidth site. I can’t think of any site that does better in these scenarios.

The first load can be quite rough though, since you need to pull down the whole app bundle. We are looking at improving first load time in various ways in 1.8 or maybe 1.7 depending on timing.

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Music to my ears. We have thousands of users in LatAm on spotty 3G connections who find us via search engines, but it’s hard to know how many we lose because they dont wait for the great web app experience to load :slight_smile:

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It is definitely quite high up on our list, right under …

:kissing_heart:

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9

6年后，我也对一个轻量级的入口点感到好奇。我不是我们 Discourse 论坛的管理员，但负责大部分支持问题的分类。

3 天前，我达到了每月的流量上限并被限速。在接下来的 3 天里，我基本上被禁止访问该网站。屏幕会停留在第一个空白屏幕上，带有 5 个进度点，似乎处于无休止的循环中。

幸运的是，我在我的账户设置中启用了邮件列表模式。因此，我可以继续回复访问者。

上面关于 gzip 是否正在运行的故障排除问题很有趣。该网站几个月前突然出现了进度点动画，初始化延迟从 4 计数增加了一倍多。

是否有简单的测试来确定服务器是否正在传输 gzipped 内容？或者传输了多少数据？

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如果您使用我们的托管服务，或者使用官方的 Docker 安装，那么 gzip 和 brotli 都会默认启用。

您可以通过 https://www.webpagetest.org/ 运行您的网站进行确认，或者在 Chrome / Safari 或 Firefox 的开发者工具中查看。

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也许可以有一个轻量级的紧急入口？

它有一个账户登录，可以进入一个低带宽的账户管理屏幕，该屏幕只有两个选项：启用/禁用邮件列表模式和发送过去一小时/一天的活动摘要电子邮件。