On Sat, 03 Aug 2013 22:29:57 +0200, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3 August 2013 21:25, Bartosz Dziewoński
<matma.rex(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, 03 Aug 2013 22:13:34 +0200, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I would actually be interested to know if new
Javascript, new
> functionality, things like the VE, etc. are routinely tested on slow
> connections. Is there anything like this in place?
I very much doubt it; however, thanks to
ResourceLoader, the bandwidth is
very rarely the bottleneck or even noticeable.
I would strongly suggest you not declare it not noticeable until
you've tried it.
I do my day-to-day browsing on a connection probably considered slow by American
standards, 1 mbps down on a good day. Surely it's no 26 kbps, but still at the bottom
end of the spectrum. I am the last person you could accuse of catering only to audiences
which happen to live in high-tech areas, both in terms of loading speed and general
resource-intensiveness, as the laptop I am using for browsing and development has already
been considered mid-end in 2006 when it was released.
As I said in the part of my message you left out, the actual download slowness is rarely
caused by either core MediaWiki scripts or extensions' ones, which go through
ResourceLoader; the culprit is local wiki customizations. All RL-loaded scripts are loaded
together in just a few requests to the server, minified and gzipped, with any graphics
embedded in the same requests as well; however, each non-RL-compatible script is loaded in
it's own separate HTTP request without minification, and each image it uses is one
more request. These add up very quickly.
Try sometimes comparing the English Wikipedia to a vanilla MediaWiki; or try loading
Special:Preferences and compare the loading speed to regular browsing (all custom scripts
are disabled there, I think in order to make it harder to completely break your account by
enabling broken gadgets). Anonymous users don't have it too bad, still, but any
power-user with dozens of gadgets enabled can feel a world of difference.
--
Matma Rex