If you want to see an even faster "forum", see
> This website is a web frontend to the DigitalMars NNTP server and mailing lists. It is part of DFeed, which is also a D news aggregator and IRC bot.
> DFeed was written mostly by Vladimir Panteleev. Portions (including style and graphics) are Copyright © by Digital Mars. The source code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License on GitHub: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
Probably as static as possible, speed is easy then.
With an empty cache, every asset except font awesome is getting to me - here in Poland - in under 200ms, with some under 150ms.
For 22 requests - even with a total payload of "only" 155kb - whether static or not, that is seriously impressive.
Write compact and easy-to-render HTML, it's no rocket science. Write some trivial CSS, you don't need Bootstrap. Make something dead-simple and call it flat design. If you have more than one stylesheet, concatenate them into one. Consider minifying. You don't need a 200 kB JS framework in order to fade in some hover menu. If you do need more than one JS file, concatenate them into one. Minify/uglify and move the <script> tag to the bottom of your HTML.
You don't need 2 MB worth of stock photos. Recently, there was a page on HN with an uncompressed 12 MB banner photo. That is insane.
You don't need those heavyweight social plugins, they ruin your day (performance-wise). If your content is great, people will find a way to share. If your boss specifically asks for Facebook and Twitter buttons, just link to https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://www.exam... and https://twitter.com/home?status=This%20is%20great:%20http://.... [1]
Don't just embed YouTube iframes, they are even worse. Use yt-embed.js [2].
Is a web font really necessary? If it is, do you really need Bold Italic? Sure as hell you don't need Ultralight+Light+Semilight+Regular+Bold, just because there is one ubercool Ultralight tagline in the footer.
Make sure Nginx or Apache gzip HTML, CSS and JS and send far-future Expires headers for all your static assets. Make sure that there are no redirects, they add latency.
If you follow these simple rules, your page weighs under 50 kB and needs no more than 10 HTTP requests. You don't even need complicated CMS caching and CloudFlare. But hey, there are some 10,000 cache plugins for WordPress, just install one.
You're ignoring that this site does use jQuery and webfonts and loads all of those pretty avatars separately. 22 requests, at my count.
For the reasons you list - i.e. words to the effect of "don't use all of this stuff" - I think that it is impressively fast, and their achievement shouldn't be hand-waved away quite so readily.
Many seem to believe that there is some secret sauce involved in making web pages load fast. There isn't. Server-side caching is no rocket science. The key is to keep everything so simple that you have the overview over every delivered byte at all times.
Take a look at the HTML of forum.dlang.org. It's so simple, if it wasn't minified, I could immediately start working on this site. When someone asks me to work on some existing wiki or blog template, I usually spend an hour removing unused code first and I still struggle to find my way around the codebase. At that point, maintaining efficiency becomes impossible.
When you have a simple codebase, you may add a font, avatars, and jQuery. The trick is to think about whether you need it, not throw it in "just in case." Specifically, some tiny avatars won't hurt overall performance as long as the page doesn't need to be redrawn. Therefore, always specify width and height attributes for your img elements in HTML or CSS.
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint_Exup%C3%A9ry#...
>You don't need 2 MB worth of stock photos. Recently, there was a page on HN with an uncompressed 12 MB banner photo. That is insane.
That seems to be a big trend nowadays and a huge pain.
Performance is not the opposite of UX, it is an important part of it.
As for D being quite fast, the consensus is that yes, it is. From what I gather, you'd be hard-pressed to beat or match it using any other language not counting perhaps assembly. It also seems to have a relatively low memory footprint comparable to that of C and C++.
IMO, more people need to be using D. It seems to outperform every other language in every speed benchmark I've seen, is packed with modern features, and doesn't have a steep learning curve. I'm not someone who has a bias toward D either. I've only recently become interested in it and I come from a background of C, C++, and C# (As well as many scripting languages).
Try D, I am.
> It seems to outperform every other language in every speed benchmark I've seen
I like D. A lot. But please don't do this. It a) does not help D's popularity (if that is what you are trying to do , b) it makes you look like a troll or makes you look stupid (sorry)
You should think before calling someone a troll or saying that they sound stupid when they're citing information from an outside source. If I didn't think Dlang had a performance benefit I'd have a bit less incentive to use it. Are you saying such benchmarks are false? They seem legitimate to me. Search and view them yourself. If I were a troll I'd do something like you did, citing no evidence. Commenting in such a way without citing data makes YOU sound stupid (Sorry).
My working hypothesis is that I don't have a good understanding of web-development to appreciate the nuances. Much akin to me listening to Indian classical music, Jazz: I would often encounter trained listeners breaking out into a (silent) applause. At those instances I feel bad because I realize I have missed something but I wish I didn't. So all pointers appreciated.
Making a site fast boils down to:
1) Making sure your server responds quickly.
2) Reducing the number of requests required for a page to load.
3) Reducing the number of bytes required for a page to load.
Under the same conditions, the dlang site loads in ~200ms.
That's half a second faster, which is definitely noticeable when clicking around.
Do you use NoScript? I feel the same way because I usually run with JS turned off. Most things are pretty zippy despite using a computer from 2009.