[jcampbell1]

I'd read this with a grain of salt. I remember looking at art.sy via the NYTimes link and thinking the site was terribly slow. I still find it moderately slow. I am not sure they really need mixpanel, google analytics, and kissmetrics, on every click and the api calls should take less than the 1-4 seconds I am seeing.

[dblock]

dblock from Art.sy here. The analytics comment is totally fair - we spent a lot of time looking at all kinds of stats as we keep experimenting and it needs to be trimmed down to 1 (or none :)).

Our average API response is 380ms. It's about 20x too long as far as I am concerned. It's not Heroku's fault to be fair, there's a mix of Ruby code, database queries and some not so easy to optimize math in some cases. It's definitely work in progress.

[bigiain]

I suspect I'm well outside your target demographic, but I'm seeing ~22 whole seconds to onload (according to Firebug) here in Sydney, Australia (as 52 requests comprising 1.6Meg of data.)

That certainly seems excessive for a non-logged-in user on your main landing page.

[dblock]

China and Australia are the worst regions right now in terms of content delivery speed by a factor of 3.

I suspect with a new AWS data center in Australia Cloudfront delivery will become better there soon, and we're looking at Akamai medium term.

[mh-]

my first (cold cache) load of the homepage took about 7-8 seconds to be usable but the rest feels fluid.

don't be discouraged, after the initial load it performs better than most sites that look this nice.

[dblock]

Thanks for the kind words. We load 1GB of CSS and JS. OK, maybe I am exaggerating :) It's a constant struggle between "it looks and feels amazing" and "it's super fast".