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by notduncansmith 4322 days ago
Took 15 seconds to load the landing page. Honestly, you lost me as a user after the first 5 but I wanted to see the rest of the page.

Scrolled to the bottom quickly, had to wait for it to animate in so I was staring at a blank page for a few seconds.

Can't be bothered to try the product, since I'll be old and gray by the time it boots.

2 comments

It's probably loading slowly because being linked on HN is giving the server too much traffic. It's self hosted anyway, so that doesn't really matter.
It does really matter - the landing page loads 1.9MB of content. This is easily 10x the size one should expect from a landing page. It's reasonable to assume that the app itself would follow similar proportions, and that means (most likely) load times upwards of 45 seconds. No thanks.
45 seconds? That sounds like a huge overestimate, especially after you've cached the assets. A reasonable internet connection should shift 1.9MB in 2-3 seconds.
Depends which country's reasonable you are talking about. In my country, broadband is anything more than 256 kbps! So, to call their services broadband, almost all providers drop speed after FUP limit (anywhere from 8-200 GB) to 256kbps.

And average speed is something like 2-3 Mbps.

Shitty internet is your problem. Fix it so you can experience the internet properly in 2014.
I would disagree. Why are pages so massive? Is the page displaying pictures and text? Like it did in 1991?

If so, why is there so much JavaScript and other fluff loaded?

The increase in average pages sizes isn't really necessary. Everyone appears to be jumping on the "let's load LOADS of data" bandwagon, which isn't much fun on a mobile connection, let alone a 2G connection.

And before you say that 2G is unacceptable, let's see how well most rural areas cope, or how well you do in a valley in Wales.

Yes, poor Internet connectivity is not great, but let's not foolishly assume that everyone is on a fibre connection. I am, but others are not, and I certainly wouldn't write software in the belief that they are running a beefy development machine that I have, nor would I write software in the belief that everyone has the same network connection. (Would the argument be "buy a better computer" really be acceptable if software that I wrote ran slowly on someone's machine due to stupid non-optimised loops????)

Not everyone is experiencing the Internet the same as you, so don't assume that they are.

Or devs could stop including fucking huge but pointless assests in what should be a simple web page.

"Test on real hardware" includes testing on the reduced bandwidth that most people have.

It took 49 seconds for me to load the __landing page__.

It would have been done in 3 seconds (which is still an insanely long amount of time) except that this image: https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nd/4.0/88x31.png took 49 seconds to load.

Chrome's network panel shows:

    Blocking ​  27.15 s
    DNS Lookup ​0.137 ms
    Connecting ​21.76 s
    SSL        ​20.59 s
    Sending ​   0.129 ms
    Waiting ​   78.344 ms
    Receiving ​ 1.252 ms
For a damn 5kb image.
If that's the case, why do we make thumbnails of pictures instead of just using an img width tag and resizing giant pictures down to thumbnail size?

1.9MB is as large as some ENTIRE pieces of software executables (though they may be dynamically linked).

EDIT: Not meant nastily, more food for thought.

Loaded fine for me. Rest of site looks good.

Will definitely try this out. May sound strange to others but I could use a project management software, even though I'm a one man project operation...