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Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get Discourse. I went to the comments, saw a comment, read a couple of replies, scrolled down, and then I found the replies again. It just doesn't make sense to me. Is it ordered by recency, or is it threaded? It sort of seems like the worst of both worlds. HN comments make sense - parent comments ordered by score, with sane threaded discussions underneath.

View on HN

The "replies" button appears to be some sort of appeasement for those who do not like the one true way of showing comments linearly.

I don't really get why discourse (apparently) does so much work to show 40 comments. I guess it might work fine on a fast enough machine, but I at least think I'd rather wait a few hundred extra milliseconds at the beginning and not have things clunking into place the whole time I'm looking through the comments.

(one true way: http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ )

Part of it is the Javascript that they're using is really heavy (I think they still have an open bug for poor performance on Android) and part of it is the backend is really really really resource hungry.

"and part of it is the backend is really really really resource hungry."

hmmm ... we are serving our topic pages in 83ms median in 6 hours I can count 4 times it took us a second to serve a topic page. This is across MANY sites.

so I am sorry going to have to call bullshit on perf issues caused by server perf. Server perf is fine.

Client perf can improve and we are constantly working on improving it.

That said:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_HJ_923/

First view 3.255 Repeat view 2.075

Is pretty good, and it is actually faster than that when navigating between pages.

The comparison is vaguely obnoxious, but HN is in the browser rendering before the first byte is returned from Discourse:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_K8_MJF/

I realize they are different systems with different goals (and different users and...), but the spare interface here does come with some benefits.

My blog runs Discourse as the backend

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_55_XPN/

just sayin...

I thought the more interesting part of the comparison was as a point of reference for the qualitative evaluation of 'fast enough'. Discourse is a lot more feature rich than HN, so the actual difference in terms of numbers isn't real useful, but HN at 0.7 seconds or whatever still doesn't feel ultra snappy.

Sorry, yes. I was mixing up a few things in my head.

It's a hybrid model, but primarily flat.

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