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Think of Discourse as a JavaScript app you load on your phone. Yes there is that unavoidable first time install on first page load, but once the app is installe

Think of Discourse as a JavaScript app you load on your phone. Yes there is that unavoidable first time install on first page load, but once the app is installed, all it needs to render the page is the JSON data that makes up the comments -- which is very efficient, far more efficient than a full HTML page load of a traditional website. So how you feel about this depends on "how often you use the app". If you only plan to visit that one page, ever, then it's not a great tradeoff (though 700kb -- no idea where you are getting 4MB from -- of images is basically nothing on a webpage these days). If you visit many discussions and many pages, it's a win. In other words a single discussion doesn't need 4000 comments, you just need to read 4000 comments across all discussions all time. I'm not sure your math is correct here, either: I just visited meta.discourse.org in incognito mode and I see about.. 700kb of javascript? http://imgur.com/a/gPiEb http://imgur.com/a/gPiEb I'm sorry but I don't know where you are getting 4 megabytes out of 700kb. See above screenshot. Answering Macha, below: - Your chosen example is missing http/2 so requests aren't batched - Discourse homepage by default shows user avatars for each participant, up to 5 in each topic, so there will be "more images" I suggest testing with meta.discourse.org (hosted) or discourse.codinghorror.com (self-hosted) to make sure you're looking at apples to apples, and properly configured sites.

Macha 9y ago
Not the parent poster, but going to the first Discourse forum in my history: http://imgur.com/BoPPL0i http://imgur.com/BoPPL0i 72 requests, 50s load time, 3.5mb data. It would have been smaller if you'd served the screenshot of the page. HN for comparison: http://imgur.com/a/8qaIN http://imgur.com/a/8qaIN 6 requests, 50kb, 0.72s Now how about your contemporary forum competition. Here's a Xenforo forum: http://i.imgur.com/tlzZ5WN.png http://i.imgur.com/tlzZ5WN.png 19 requests, 2mb, 5s And that's with the massive background image you can see, which is 1mb in size by itself. EDIT: Since Jeff stated the comparisons weren't apples to apples, xenforo.com/community vs meta.discourse.org . Both boards running in basically stock configuration from their own sites: * Xenforo.com: 43 requests, 1.4mb, 4s * meta.discourse.org: 73 requests: 3.2mb, 4.5s http://imgur.com/a/SihGh http://imgur.com/a/SihGh Definitely a better showing than the ACEO forums, but still loses the comparison. Too lazy to take more screenshots, but reddit is 50 requests, 1.3mb, 3s for comparison.
- codinghorror 9y ago
  This isn't remotely apples to apples; for example, HN has zero avatars, Xenforo has zero avatars, whereas Discourse shows up to five avatars per topic, of which there are many on the homepage. I'm unclear where you are getting 3.2MB from, since sorting by filesize, here are the largest network requests at meta.discourse.org: http://imgur.com/8v4Fp4L http://imgur.com/8v4Fp4L As you can see, starting at 11.5kb and below it's all images (avatars). I suppose you could try with images disabled. If you want to make a case that 'not showing avatars by default uses less bandwidth', then I guess I can agree with that. But these images won't affect actual load time, as images rez in later, and all the dimensions are set on the page.
aleyan 9y ago
Thanks for the reply. You have me convinced with amortizing the cost of js over multiple visits rather than a single thread. Regarding the 4mb thing, I pulled it out of 1wd's comment. It would be best if 1wd came back and explained. That said, I believe the discrepancy is probably between the size of compressed javascript in the network and it's uncompressed size. Firefox dev tools show 3.1mb for meta.discourse.org. I don't know how to view the total size in Chrome's dev tools, but if you click the "use large request rows" in the Network tab you will see that application.js by itself takes up 1.5mb.

Macha 9y ago

Not the parent poster, but going to the first Discourse forum in my history: http://imgur.com/BoPPL0i http://imgur.com/BoPPL0i 72 requests, 50s load time, 3.5mb data. It would have been smaller if you'd served the screenshot of the page. HN for comparison: http://imgur.com/a/8qaIN http://imgur.com/a/8qaIN 6 requests, 50kb, 0.72s Now how about your contemporary forum competition. Here's a Xenforo forum: http://i.imgur.com/tlzZ5WN.png http://i.imgur.com/tlzZ5WN.png 19 requests, 2mb, 5s And that's with the massive background image you can see, which is 1mb in size by itself. EDIT: Since Jeff stated the comparisons weren't apples to apples, xenforo.com/community vs meta.discourse.org . Both boards running in basically stock configuration from their own sites: * Xenforo.com: 43 requests, 1.4mb, 4s * meta.discourse.org: 73 requests: 3.2mb, 4.5s http://imgur.com/a/SihGh http://imgur.com/a/SihGh Definitely a better showing than the ACEO forums, but still loses the comparison. Too lazy to take more screenshots, but reddit is 50 requests, 1.3mb, 3s for comparison.

codinghorror 9y ago
This isn't remotely apples to apples; for example, HN has zero avatars, Xenforo has zero avatars, whereas Discourse shows up to five avatars per topic, of which there are many on the homepage. I'm unclear where you are getting 3.2MB from, since sorting by filesize, here are the largest network requests at meta.discourse.org: http://imgur.com/8v4Fp4L http://imgur.com/8v4Fp4L As you can see, starting at 11.5kb and below it's all images (avatars). I suppose you could try with images disabled. If you want to make a case that 'not showing avatars by default uses less bandwidth', then I guess I can agree with that. But these images won't affect actual load time, as images rez in later, and all the dimensions are set on the page.

aleyan 9y ago

Thanks for the reply. You have me convinced with amortizing the cost of js over multiple visits rather than a single thread. Regarding the 4mb thing, I pulled it out of 1wd's comment. It would be best if 1wd came back and explained. That said, I believe the discrepancy is probably between the size of compressed javascript in the network and it's uncompressed size. Firefox dev tools show 3.1mb for meta.discourse.org. I don't know how to view the total size in Chrome's dev tools, but if you click the "use large request rows" in the Network tab you will see that application.js by itself takes up 1.5mb.