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by Twirrim 3081 days ago
For what it's worth, they've been bought out since the malware thing happened, and one of the first things they did was cut that shit out.

But holy crap this is terrible. 101 requests while using an adblocker, 116 without. Of those requests I count 62 of them being to download Javascript. More than half?!

Out of curiosity, retried using pingdom's tools: https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/z7f8e/https://sourceforge.net/p...

It gets a solid D, unsurprisingly. They saw over 200 requests, 43% were javascript calls, and javascript made up more than 52% of the final page content loaded. That's just nuts, considering what the site actually is.

I don't like to pick on websites and developers that much, but holy crap what were they thinking? Did they even consider what the experience is like outside of their dev laptop or using a fast network?
1 comments
zmix 3080 days ago
I am logged in.

I got 7 ad-warnings on "uBlock Origin" and the page is lean.

link
Twirrim 3080 days ago
Open up the network debugger (Tools -> Web Developer -> Network in Firefox, View->Developer->Developer Tools -> Network in Chrome), do a forced reload and see what you get.

Even logged in I still get a ridiculous number of things loaded. The biggest culprits look to be the foundation javascript stuff (I'm assuming that's a javascript framework) being loaded from fsdn.com. Every request made, hurts, unless you're lucky to be using HTTP/2.0 (they don't support 2.0), and even then you've got to think about interpreter starting/loading/parsing/executing time. For every script.

They're also passing parameters in the javascript urls (e.g. handlebars.js?1515608140) which really meddles with caching etc.

The latency situation gets even worse if you're anywhere but on a fast connection (so lots of end users in their global target market).

I like the overall look of the new site, but it's a performance nightmare.

link