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Doesn't something have to be fast in order for it to be kept fast? My experience using the Github web frontend is one mostly of frustrating slowness, especially

Doesn't something have to be fast in order for it to be kept fast? My experience using the Github web frontend is one mostly of frustrating slowness, especially as of late.

chubot 14y ago
Yeah I don't understand this at all. The main reason I don't use Github is because of the high latency. I really dislike their source browser -- it has really low information density and the animation clumsily hides latency.
- chubot 14y ago
  EDIT: I did some spot checks with chrome developer tools on a project linked from their front page: https://github.com/rails/rails https://github.com/rails/rails Chrome is reporting the code tab is taking 3.7 seconds to load. 22 HTTP requests. The Pull tab has over 100 HTTP requests. I don't consider anything over 1s to be fast. Even the initial HTML is taking more than 1.5 seconds on the Pull tab! I think you should aim for 200ms for the HTML, and maybe 1s total. This is many times slower.
  - notJim 14y ago
    Do you have an idea of a site that you consider fast? I just checked a few sites around the web, and 1.x seconds seems pretty average (I'm looking at the onload time, as that seems like a somewhat-maybe scientific way of looking at things.)
    - chubot 14y ago
      Most Google sites (less so lately since there is more Ajax), craigslist, reddit of 4 years ago, HN of 2 years ago. Basically all the bare-bones content-driven sites, since people tend to write JS and CSS in a way that makes the site at least 100% slower. Amazon is pretty decent. Their full page loads are slow, but they concentrate on above-the-fold time which is OK. I don't use Facebook much, but I think they have pretty good latency. I think Microsoft's new mail is pretty fast but I haven't used it much. I would say 1.x seconds for initial HTML is average. And 3-4 seconds for the full page with all assets is average. Github is in the 3-4 seconds range for onload time. So Github is not particularly bad -- it's just average. It's certainly not "fast". I feel like Github's perceived latency is pretty bad. I think they end up showing spinners and redrawing various parts of page to try to hide latency, but it makes it seem janky to me.
    - teejae 14y ago
      I think we at YouTube think our site loads pretty fast.
wamatt 14y ago
Upon further investigation, it's not just the API, it's the entire site. A significant cause of the issue is their SSL implementation. Specifically it negotiates a new connection every time instead of resuming the session, eek! http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/5511/ssl-session-resumption-and-ids http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/5511/ssl-session... https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=github%2ecom&s=207%2e97%2e227%2e243 https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=github%2ecom&...
- nodesocket 14y ago
  Is this a problem with the default setup of Nginx out of the box, or has GitHub intentionally disabled session resumption?
  - wamatt 14y ago
    Haven't tried the latest nginx install, but according to the wiki, ssl_session_cache controls this, and is set to 'none' by default. http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule As for Github, could just be a misconfiguration, or perhaps they had some more deliberate reason in mind. Good news is I just received confirmation from one of the ops guys. He says they know about it, and are working on a fix. :)
    - nodesocket 14y ago
      Awesome, GitHub ops on it. :) Curious if there will be a speed improvement once they enable session resumption. Any idea why the default in nginx is: none. Soft off: nginx says to a client that session can be resued, but nginx actually never reuses them. Seems like a bad default to not cache.
jarcoal 14y ago
Strange, Github is blazing fast in my experience. Bitbucket on the other hand is insanely slow, especially in the source browser. That said, I gladly tolerate it due to unlimited free private repos and a decent feature set.

Doesn't something have to be fast in order for it to be kept fast? My experience using the Github web frontend is one mostly of frustrating slowness, especially as of late.

chubot 14y ago

Yeah I don't understand this at all. The main reason I don't use Github is because of the high latency. I really dislike their source browser -- it has really low information density and the animation clumsily hides latency.

chubot 14y ago
EDIT: I did some spot checks with chrome developer tools on a project linked from their front page: https://github.com/rails/rails https://github.com/rails/rails Chrome is reporting the code tab is taking 3.7 seconds to load. 22 HTTP requests. The Pull tab has over 100 HTTP requests. I don't consider anything over 1s to be fast. Even the initial HTML is taking more than 1.5 seconds on the Pull tab! I think you should aim for 200ms for the HTML, and maybe 1s total. This is many times slower.
- notJim 14y ago
  Do you have an idea of a site that you consider fast? I just checked a few sites around the web, and 1.x seconds seems pretty average (I'm looking at the onload time, as that seems like a somewhat-maybe scientific way of looking at things.)
  - chubot 14y ago
    Most Google sites (less so lately since there is more Ajax), craigslist, reddit of 4 years ago, HN of 2 years ago. Basically all the bare-bones content-driven sites, since people tend to write JS and CSS in a way that makes the site at least 100% slower. Amazon is pretty decent. Their full page loads are slow, but they concentrate on above-the-fold time which is OK. I don't use Facebook much, but I think they have pretty good latency. I think Microsoft's new mail is pretty fast but I haven't used it much. I would say 1.x seconds for initial HTML is average. And 3-4 seconds for the full page with all assets is average. Github is in the 3-4 seconds range for onload time. So Github is not particularly bad -- it's just average. It's certainly not "fast". I feel like Github's perceived latency is pretty bad. I think they end up showing spinners and redrawing various parts of page to try to hide latency, but it makes it seem janky to me.
  - teejae 14y ago
    I think we at YouTube think our site loads pretty fast.

wamatt 14y ago

Upon further investigation, it's not just the API, it's the entire site. A significant cause of the issue is their SSL implementation. Specifically it negotiates a new connection every time instead of resuming the session, eek! http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/5511/ssl-session-resumption-and-ids http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/5511/ssl-session... https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=github%2ecom&s=207%2e97%2e227%2e243 https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=github%2ecom&...

nodesocket 14y ago
Is this a problem with the default setup of Nginx out of the box, or has GitHub intentionally disabled session resumption?
- wamatt 14y ago
  Haven't tried the latest nginx install, but according to the wiki, ssl_session_cache controls this, and is set to 'none' by default. http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule As for Github, could just be a misconfiguration, or perhaps they had some more deliberate reason in mind. Good news is I just received confirmation from one of the ops guys. He says they know about it, and are working on a fix. :)
  - nodesocket 14y ago
    Awesome, GitHub ops on it. :) Curious if there will be a speed improvement once they enable session resumption. Any idea why the default in nginx is: none. Soft off: nginx says to a client that session can be resued, but nginx actually never reuses them. Seems like a bad default to not cache.

jarcoal 14y ago

Strange, Github is blazing fast in my experience. Bitbucket on the other hand is insanely slow, especially in the source browser. That said, I gladly tolerate it due to unlimited free private repos and a decent feature set.