I forget when I first noticed this -- quite a while ago, after one of the site updates, I want to say in the last 6-12 months? But don't quote me on that. However seeing this post in another thread reminded me:
Originally Posted by
IBJoel
... unfortunately allowing larger [image] files can drastically draw out page loading, especially on larger threads.
It's been my observation that page load times have increased, especially for old threads with high post counts. I haven't sat down with a stopwatch, but I would not be surprised if it was either directly or highly correlated with the actual post count (i.e. the more replies in the thread, the longer it takes to load). This is particularly noticeable in some of the longer-running OMNI threads with 10k+ replies. This happens whether you click the thread title to view the first page, or click on "go to first new post" from your subscriptions page.
It almost feels like the app server is loading *all* of the posts for the thread (and possibly transmitting them to the browser client) before displaying just the slice that's on the visible page (which needless to say, if that's what's actually happening, is needlessly inefficient). On repeated reloads, sometimes the subsequent reloads are faster, sometimes they aren't. Clearing my local browser cache doesn't seem to make a difference so there may be some app/proxy/db layer caching on the server side.
For example, this OMNI thread:
I need to vent... or the "first new post" version:
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/omni...-new-post.html
10 seconds to first response, i.e. blank browser page spinning away with "Waiting for www.flyertalk.com..." in the status at the bottom of the window for 10 seconds until anything shows up. (Also LOL at 1.3 minutes to "finish" -- even after most of the content has been rendered, it spent more than a full minute continuing to background load who knows how may dozens of iframes and probably beacons and trackers -- this sort of garbage is what drives people to use blocking software)
Anyway I suppose this mostly only affects OMNI since the travel-related forums probably do not see as many long-lived megathreads (though there are certainly some). But since it seems like a significant number of older posters have migrated into posting only in OMNI maybe it would be worth addressing.
