Seconds to load for first visit

vord

Member
It's an SEO and usability thing again. First visit download time depends a lot on how many megabites of javascript and the like you need to download before the forum appears and how good your server connection is.

I'm not far off dial up myself. vB3 is best at around 3 seconds. vB4 tends to take 10 seconds (the reason I didn't upgrade), xenforo is in the middle at around 5 seconds.

Is first download speed a consideration for xenforo? If we can stay at 5 seconds for me I'd be happy. Worried you will add more complication for something to do once it's launched. If you made 10 seconds I'd go with IPB.
 
I've tested the official homepages of various software with cache cleared:
vBulletin community: 7 seconds
IPB community: 7 seconds
XenForo community: 5 seconds
My vBullitin 3.8: 5 seconds

Not a lot in it to be fair. Speed is one of my major buying points for software. I'm on roughly 250k or 500k depending on the weather. While the majority are on quicker connections it's good to consider the ones slower than me.
 
Software innovation unfortunately comes with sacrifice. Even wordpress now, it is really needing a decent VPS to deliver performance, as shared hosting with innovative software is just useless. Its like users want software to advance, yet refuse to accept that their hosting requirements must also advance in conjunction to cater the performance requirement to effectively deliver at the same 5 year ago speed.

Shared hosting is useless if you want to run any type of social networking platform, forums pretty much fitting within that realm. You need scalable hosting solutions nowadays for anything remotely social oriented with innovation encompassed. I have no doubt xenforo will become slower as more requests continue being made and implemented... and there is no shortage of them in the suggestions forum. You just can't have everything without sacrifice, or cost to improve x to have y.

Your physical location means everything. Host in the US and view from the US, you are going to get a faster rate than US hosted and viewed in the UK, Australia, Europe, vice versa. Sites I have hosted locally in Oz... OMFG, the difference is immediately noticeable compared to one's hosted in the US on better grade equipment and far superior performance.

Server specs, distance, connection speed, computer itself being viewed upon, all factors on how fast or slow a website will load for everyone uniquely. I think its a bit hard to factor all those aspects in order to make a sound judgement on accurate speed / performance tests.
 
We should see a fairly big jump in load speed when we minify our CSS and Javascript. We have not done so at this stage because we are still using this site for debugging.
 
Kier, will you be releasing the non minified CSS and Javascript along with the minified ones ?
I ask this from a developper point of view, as I like having examples on how it's done beyond my eyes.
 
Brilliant! Looking forward to see the software progress. If anyone can code efficiently it'll be you and Mike.

I've got a dedicated server to put it on - load times for my current forum are 2 seconds for the majority (according to Google tools). I'd jump at the chance to get that properly speedy.
 
There are actually still people with a 500kb/s connection? I'd almost feel guilty with the 100mb/s connection I have. :P

But really, you can't forever support everything. Maybe there are still people that use IE4, we wouldn't want to support that too (by sacrificing stuff for more up to date browsers), would we?
 
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