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