TURN BANNERS OFF WIZCHAN TO DRASTICALLY SPEED UP PAGE LOAD TIMES.
I am a software engineer and I was looking at page load times to see if I had network issues on my end. When I looked at Wizchan I saw something I thought was worth mentioning:
for board listings, catalogues, and threads – you end up with a light weight HTML page. This is one request but when the browser gets back the HTML it goes in parallel to fetch all the additional files it needs
TIME
GET HTML –→
HTML ←—–
GET FILES
——→ …
The problem is what happens when the client tries to get a banner. It visits a PHP file. Lets call it banner.php. This file basically tells the browser to then make another request to load the banner.
GET BANNER.PHP
——-→
←—————
"I don't have it but here's where you can get it."
The browser then makes another request to download the file. All of this slows the page from being finished. If there is packet loss downloading the banners.php file it can add all of the extra roundtrip on top. This can be significant on unreliable networks + adding SSL overhead. Depending on the browser this will prevent various DOM elements from being finished rendering e.g. scroll bars and so on UNTIL BANNERS ARE DOWNLOADED.
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