[WikiEN-l] Page loading

[quiddity]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 4:25 PM, Alan Liefting <aliefting at 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.