What is going on when the site is loading?

[jidanni (Dan Jacobson)]

Try this experiment. After a couple weeks of not using this site, suddenly decide you want to have a look.

While watching those dots, the user is curious, what in the world is going on? Other sites are in a hurry to get something on that screen. But for some reason Discourse is doing something extra special behind the scenes to make things super good for us, so yes, we are grateful for whatever it’s doing. Perhaps it’s loading a lot of JavaScript or something.

Are you sure you couldn’t just put up a pre-prepared initial screen, especially if the user is landing on the homepage?

I mean about 90% of the initial screen will be about the same… perhaps some pinned topics or something.

Well anyway I’m saying you guys got to get something on that screen faster!

I mean let’s just say what if the competition could get something on that screen faster?

Yeah I know you don’t care about so-called competition, never mind.

Well then just for humane treatment of the users you might say it’s still good to get something on that screen faster.

Now don’t get angry. I’m just trying to dig out anything I can figure out that would help here.

I mean I wouldn’t want to miss telling you about something that you might not notice.

Full disclosure: I use a rather slow network. But that shouldn’t matter!

Do know that I’m not criticizing any one particular site. I’m just trying to make things better for users worldwide of all the sites.

[merefield (Robert)]

Introducing Discourse Splash - A visual preloader displayed while site assets load

Discourse is a single-page Javascript application. This means that navigation within the app is blazingly fast. The compromise with modern web applications is that they must be loaded and parsed on the initial page view. While we’ve been doing a lot of work over the years to optimize how we serve site assets, this can sometimes be a little bit slow based on device/network conditions. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been actively working and testing potential improvements for the initial wait th…

[jidanni (Dan Jacobson)]

Well a quick look at that thread just shows it kind of petered out in October 2023.

Can you give us a update? Thanks.

[merefield (Robert)]

An update on what? That’s the explanation

@jidanni

Full disclosure: I use a rather slow network. But that shouldn’t matter!

This does matter.

The assets of the site have to be downloaded. They benefit from caching, but if you return much later you may find there’s a chunk new to download.

That’s no different from having to update an app, but it happens automatically and every time. That’s the nature of web apps.

One of the significant benefits of this approach (similar to native apps) is that the incremental data retrieves whilst using the web app are much smaller since most of the client code is already loaded in the initial load and you are usually only downloading relatively svelte json data as you navigate and do things.

[anon36555649]

How slow of a network how slow does the site load?

With fast loading have noticed this occasionally:

Loading bug

Description Loading screen shows multiple rivers instead of one and duplicate rocks. Repro Steps Loaded site from Austrian I.P. address. Screenshots [Screen Shot 2024-01-26 at 8.38.33 AM.png] Platform Mac (desktop) Browser Firefox Additional Comments This may be a bug with the site/theme or just slow network loading process.

That was slowed down by going through four different countries first bust still only takes a few seconds to load.