On Sat, 03 Aug 2013 22:29:57 +0200, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 3 August 2013 21:25, Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, 03 Aug 2013 22:13:34 +0200, David Gerard dgerard@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.