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Comment by reppap | Hacker News Reader

One thing that's really nice about codeberg is how fast the pages load. Browsing GitHub often feels very sluggish. Obviously there's a difference in scale there, but I hope codeberg can keep being fast.

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Indeed. Github is a nightmare when I'm working on an unreliable 4G connection too (e.g. on a train in the UK). Half the page will load.

Night and day compared to something like Linear.

That is surprising. It is the opposite for me.

  $ time curl -L 'https://codeberg.org/'
  real    0m3.063s
  user    0m0.060s
  sys     0m0.044s

  $ time curl -L 'https://github.com/'
  real    0m1.357s
  user    0m0.077s
  sys     0m0.096s

That depends on location and GitHub pages generally take a while to execute all the javascript for a usable page even after the html is fetched while pages on Codeberg require much less javascript to be usable and are quite usable even without javascript.

Here are my results for what it's worth

  $ time curl -o /dev/null -s -L 'https://codeberg.org'

  real    0m0.907s
  user    0m0.027s
  sys     0m0.009s

  $ time curl -o /dev/null -s -L 'https://github.com/'

  real    0m0.514s
  user    0m0.028s
  sys     0m0.016s

Sure, it depends on your internet connection. But for Codeberg I see a blank page for 3-4 seconds until it shows something. On a big repo like Zig the delay is even worse.

On Github any page loads gradually and you don't see a blank page even initially.

A better benchmark is done through the web browser inspector (network tab or performance tab). In the network tab I got (cache disabled)

  Github
  158 requests
  15.56 MB (11.28 MB transferred)
  Finish in 8.39s
  Dom loaded in 2.46s
  Load 6.95s

  Codeberg
  9 requests
  1.94 MB (533.85 KB transferred)
  Finish in 3.58s
  Dom loaded in 3.21s
  Load 3.31s

I guess Github uses a lot of cache vs Codeberg.

I think you read that backwards. In skydhash's test, Codeberg's data was 72% cached, and GitHub's data was 28% cached. Maybe you meant that GitHub's cached 4.28MB was, in absolute terms, more than Codeberg's cached 1.41MB?

Yeah, that is what I meant. It looks like Github's strategy is to push all the initial data they need to cache, to optimize subsequent requests.

Some parts of Github are SPA island, which is why the DOM load fast, but then it has to wait for the JavaScript files and the request made by those files. Codeberg can be used with JavaScript disabled and you don’t have that much extra requests (almost everything is rendered serverside).

The transferred part is for the gzipped transfer. That makes sense if the bulk of the data is HTML (I have not checked).

I’ve disabled the cache for the network requests.

Oh, thank you for the correction. That was a dumb mistake on my part.

GitHub frontpage is very quick indeed, but browsing repos can sometimes have load times over a full second for me. Especially when it's less popular repos less likely to be in a cache.

Try changing tabs when reviewing a PR. 5-10 seconds on basic PRs often

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