Hmm, doesn't seem any slower than usual here in the contiguous 48!

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 7:25 PM, Alan Liefting aliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:

Pages with 100s of references seem to be slow to load all of the listed references. Is this a server speed thing? Or is it our slow internet in NZ? Try it with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylie_Minogue

-- Alan Liefting 107 Warrington Street Mairehau Christchurch (03)385-3830 (027)646-1425

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On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 4:25 PM, Alan Liefting aliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:

Pages with 100s of references seem to be slow to load all of the listed references. Is this a server speed thing? Or is it our slow internet in NZ? Try it with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylie_Minogue

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.