Ask HN: Why is LinkedIn's website so slow? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is LinkedIn's website so slow?

11 pointsgnicholas12 comments

Since LinkedIn launched its new website, it has become unbearably slow — especially in Firefox, but also in Chrome. Even simple things, like clicking on the notification icon (which lights up for the dumbest things) takes many seconds to load a new page. Of course, checking notifications should probably be a dropdown instead of taking me to a separate page. But regardless, a new page load should never take this long.

How is it that such a well-known tech company can have such a slow website for its main product?

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My theory is that they have little incentive to improve performance. All of your professional network is there, and it's not like there's another website with nearly as many people on it for that purpose. So you will use it no matter how crappy the performance may be, because that won't negatively affect their revenue nearly as much as an e-commerce website.

FWIW, doessn't take that long for me by a long shot; sub-1sec page loads across the site.

I figured this had to be the case for some folks, otherwise it would have been fixed long ago. I'd be curious to know what your setup is. I'm running Mac OS Sierra on a 2013 MBA, connected via Comcast in the heart of Silicon Valley. My computer isn't a speed demon, but it's also not a slug. LinkedIn is by far the slowest website I visit with any regularity, and I have tried script blockers and such to no avail.

From here in Australia, on an i7 with 16Gb RAM, using the gigabit link in my office, I see multiple second loading screens with the circular "loading" animation in both Chrome and Edge. It's by far the slowest site I've looked at on a regular basis.

You see a circular loading animation? For me, it's a horizontal bar with a blue bit that dances left-to-right.

Maybe it's slow trying to pull the A/B testing configuration.

I see the horizontal loading, and it is also very slow (30 seconds + in some cases)

Across the board for me, ranging from old Air running Sierra to '15 MBP. Air at home is on FiOS, MBP at work has decent network. US East Coast.

browser? any blockers/extensions?

Across browsers, Safari is stock, Chrome has maybe a million extensions but nothing that would affect LI, FF is mostly bare but a very old version (42?) due to a work requirement.

Because Microsoft owns it now.

All jokes aside, the important parts of the linkedin pages load in under 2 seconds for me. I'm using chrome without any extensions.

What are you using to test it and examine all the different scripts that they are loading?

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