Re: [WikiEN-l] Page loading

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 4:25 PM, Alan Liefting <aliefting(a)ihug.co.nz> wrote: To test page load speed, I generally: clear browser cache, then load a random Wikipedia page (to establish the core css and js and image files), then load the test page... Firstly, in Firefox. attempt 1: 9 seconds to load Kylie Minogue (the article is 93kb in size, 152 footnotes) 35 seconds to load United States (167kb, 209 footnotes) 52 seconds to load July 2010 in sports (266kb, 0 footnotes, but hundreds of icon templates) cleared cache, tried again. attempt 2: 9 seconds to load Kylie Minogue 14 seconds to load United States 25 seconds to load July 2010 in sports and attempt 3 gave the same results as attempt 2. Opera gives markedly faster results: 7 10 14 Google Chrome gives 5 8 8 Various culprits have been suggested: (a large quantity of templates; a large quantity of images; having the references in columns; the size and complexity of navboxes, etc) Also, if a page hasn't been accessed in a while, it will take a little longer because the server has to create an uptodate static page to serve you. (See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cache_strategy and related) The old rule-of-thumb is best summarized by Nielsen. 1 second is good, 10 seconds is maximum: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/sizelimits.html and http://www.useit.com/alertbox/response-times.html etc Our rule-of-thumb is basically "split article if over 100kb" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SIZE). We don't have any guidelines for maximum number of templates/images (afaik) except for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_limits For further background, search Village Pump archives to see at least 7 years worth of people complaining about slow page loads. There were also many comments about poor speed, at the recent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_experience_feedback Hopefully, everyone is working on it (browser programmers, wikimedia programmers, template coders, etc). HTH. Sorry for rambling. Quiddity.