I’ve mostly been a .world user, but have this alt account on .ca as a backup. I logged into it to make sure I didn’t have anything in my inbox, and noticed that everything loads so much faster. In both cases I’m using the browser interface from my tablet, sorting by all. On .world, there’s a pause before the text comes up, then the thumbnails and graphics slowly populate. On .ca, it all pretty much loads instantly.
Is it just the number of users being a lot bigger? More community activity? Hardware differences? Running different software versions? A combination of these? I’m curious.
I’m in the US, in Southern California, so for sure could be contributing. Not sure where .ca is hosted.
As for an example, I just went to .world on my desktop browser (firefox) and loaded /all /new. It was 16 seconds between the click and all the visible graphics being loaded. The same thing on .ca was just under 5 seconds. On my tablet, the difference is greater.
how long does it take in an incognito browser window?
Oh, much, much faster! Interesting. Okay, why is that?
there were some caching issues in lemmy-ui where it would unnecessarily eat up disk space for caching without even making use of it properly. there was a change done in 0.19.12 that was supposed to mitigate this, but for users who have already collected this it won’t automatically delete the unnecessary cache until they logout: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/3150
even when clearing this manually though i still see this take longer than you’d expect to load, it seems that the image cache is still slowing things down.
i also had some delays on images on the front page before all media loaded. i was able to speed things up again by executing
await window.caches.delete("image-cache")in my browser dev tools console, but that is certainly not something to expect from regular users.i’ve raised a new issue about this now: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/3195
meanwhile, you can also work around this by deleting cached data for lemmy.world in your browser, at least until it fills up again.
Excellent, thank you. I just cleared my cache and it does seem to have helped a fair amount. Not nearly as fast as in a private window, but probably as fast as .ca is now. Much appreciated, I’m glad I asked.
I guess that would explain why people who access it with an app don’t seem to have the same issue, correct?
probably, this caching is just affecting the default lemmy web interface.
other apps or web interfaces may have their own caching implementations, though for web based stuff it’s typically fine to leave it up to the browser, as long as there are suitable cache-control headers sent by the server.