How slow is Discourse on your mobile?
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@lolwhat - Days Since Last Discourse Bug: -1
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OK, if you deploy latest we cut down page size in half on Android for topics and topic lists. This does help a LOT in my testing on the Nexus 9 and Nexus 7.
Longer term solutions are also ongoing of course. I am especially glad to hear the Chrome Android guys are making headway on this, as that's where the root of the problem is.
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glad to hear the Chrome Android guys are making headway on this, as that's where the root of the problem is.
I like how you keep saying that and completely ignoring the people with bad performance on other platforms or in different browsers.
Oh, wait - you're not ignoring Windows Phone are you? Anybody claiming to use it is just trolling
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http://discuss.howtogeek.com/t/why-doesnt-htg-cover-windows-phone/22584/16?u=codinghorror
I'm not opposed to it, we have a test Lumia device, but it's not a priority because the market share is so tiny.
I do know that recent Ember changes affect IE disproportionately, but this is expected to even out in 1.10, the next release.
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+1 for using someone else's blog as evidence rather than your own I suppose.
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Bit of a self reinforcing cycle though, isn't it?
Should your site not bother supporting Windows phone because few of your visitors use it?
Or do you have few Windows phone users because your site doesn't support it?
It's obviously a distant 3rd to Android and iOS but there's still many millions of MS phones out there...
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OK, if you deploy latest we cut down page size in half on Android for topics and topic lists
Got to like how you've created a solution for all platforms, and restricted it to Android only...
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Seems more like reinforcement of the "Web apps are teh futurz, write once run on refrigerators!" being a complete farce.
Begs the question is the issue IE Mobile or Discourse and its need to abuse the DOM every nano-second cause, "Teh updates, must knows!". If I wanted a chatroom web app I'll go dig up a fucking AOL 4.0 CD with ChexQuest Bonus Package for Free (limited to first 24 hours then $9.99 per minute).
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Can't you just serve something more lightweight to all mobile platforms?
I appreciate you're doing some work to make it suck less on mobile, so that's cool, but it is treating the symptom and not the cause.
It's also rubbish on Android Firefox, although appreciably less so than Chrome, and the results for iOS devices past the more recent ones aren't exactly amazing.
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Can't you just serve something more lightweight to all mobile platforms?
:crazytalk.rdq:!
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Can't you just serve something more lightweight to all mobile platforms?
Obviously not, serving text over the internet is an unprecedented technological challenge that can only be done with a heavyweight Javascript framework.
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I do know that recent Ember changes affect IE disproportionately, but this is expected to even out in 1.10, the next release.
Did you morons choose Ember specifically so you could then scapegoat it for all your problems?
Hey, here's a topic for your blog: when moron software companies pick a shitty library, they are then shipping a shitty library as their own code. You're responsible for the stuff you ship as part of your project, regardless of who the original developer is. If Ember is too slow, that means you dumbshits chose a shitty library and now need to make some hard choices (or just sit back and let your product be a piece of shit because you don't even slightly care about quality. Which is more likely.)
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Oh, wait - you're not ignoring Windows Phone are you? Anybody claiming to use it is just trolling
I only troll with my Windows Phone because it's ancient. I'd be more concerned if I had a new one and Discourse was still unusable.
Truth is most websites are unusable on WP7 now. I loaded up Wikipedia the other day and the search bar isn't even available on mobile IE! The only thing I could do was click "Random Article" and follow links.
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Bit of a self reinforcing cycle though, isn't it?
Should your site not bother supporting Windows phone because few of your visitors use it?
Also the "I don't like Windows Phone so people who use it should suffer" attitude.
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Also the "I don't like Windows Phone so people who use it should suffer" attitude.
"Devicive" behavior.
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Also the "I don't like Windows Phone so people who use it should suffer" attitude.
I think we can all agree, @codinghorror is devicist
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These forums are completely unusable on mobile unless the topic is brand new and has few posts. My S5 is just choking on all the JSey, AJAXey wonder.
As a side note, yesterday I got annoyed with a topic not loading and did not close out of Chrome. ~2 hours later my phone dings and when I checked it the battery was dead. Normal battery life for my S5 is almost two days. Leaving a Discourse instance open cuts that down to 2 hours. That is completely unacceptable.
Addendum: WTF happened with the layout for the editor window? I used to hit Tab + Enter when I was done with a post and it would submit, now it does nothing? Why was this changed??
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Ok Jeff, just tell me I am Doing It Wrong. ;-)
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@Intercourse said:
just tell me I am Doing It Wrong
does that mean I've been doing it right? That doesn't sound like me
Edit:
tabspace also seems to work, obviously.:DISCOOOURSEE!.jpg:
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This is the shit I get for taking up for Jeff the other day. DiscoKarma.
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@Intercourse said:
My S5 is just choking on all the JSey, AJAXey wonder.
Well, yeah, Android: it used to be 3x-5x slower than iOS, with Ember 1.8 it will now be 6x - 10x slower. We cut the number of topics and replies loaded at once in half, so that gets it closer to the original values at least.
Hopefully their Android V8 fixes will land in the next 6-12 months. I know a few are already present. I honestly have no idea how long it takes between "Google engineer working on Chrome checks in fix" and "fix deployed to end users as a version of Chrome".
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Are you seriously ok with >80% (Android market share) of the mobile users visiting Discourse sites finding it incredibly slow (cutting edge devices), to completely unusable (> 2 year old devices)? For 6 - 12 months, and then maybe, hopefully, it might get better?
I know you consider it an Android issue, since your software is apparently much better on iOS, but is there nothing you can do in the meantime? Some crude, ugly, temporary hacks just to get performance up on Android right now rather than in the indeterminate future? Any super basic, bare bones version you could deliver to Android devices? No? Bueller? Bueller?
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You expect him to treat the world's #1 smartphone/tablet platform equal to his favoured white shiny?
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I know you consider it an Android issue
I'm not even sure about that. Jeff seems to be alternating between "it's an Android issue" and "it's a Chrome [on Android]" issue.
That distinction is important: if he thinks it's the latter, people who use Android but not Chrome will have no hope of improvement in their Discourse experience, ever.
Unless tCotCDCK decides to fix/workaround/improve on their side instead of waiting for improvements on the browser side, of course...
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Well, yeah, Android: it used to be 3x-5x slower than iOS, with Ember 1.8 it will now be 6x - 10x slower. We cut the number of topics and replies loaded at once in half, so that gets it closer to the original values at least.
Hopefully their Android V8 fixes will land in the next 6-12 months. I know a few are already present. I honestly have no idea how long it takes between "Google engineer working on Chrome checks in fix" and "fix deployed to end users as a version of Chrome".
Ladies and gentleman, mad scientists, and others: we are about to show, through witnesses, deposition, and a series of a still frames, that the producers of this forum software, Discourse, just did not care.
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Hopefully their Android V8 fixes will land in the next 6-12 months. I know a few are already present. I honestly have no idea how long it takes between "Google engineer working on Chrome checks in fix" and "fix deployed to end users as a version of Chrome".
It's weird that the regular Android browser works better than Chrome. Too bad, too, given all the missing functionality. But maybe it'll work better for people who are having problems with Chrome?
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Well, yeah, Android: it used to be 3x-5x slower than iOS, with Ember 1.8 it will now be 6x - 10x slower.
Anytime someone brings up how shit Discourse is on mobile, you parrot this line as though it somehow changes that users experience on forums that use your software. It doesn't.
We get it. There is a big problem with JS on Discourse. We are tech people though. The majority of people do not even know WTF Javascript is. Also, they don't fucking care. All they know is that when they go to their forum of choice while on their phone is that shit does not load. They see a perpetual spinner a large portion of the time. That is a shitty user experience.
These people are not even in the minority. Android has a majority market share on mobile mostly because there are a shitload of inexpensive Android smart phones out there. The majority of the people who visit your forum software on a mobile device are having a really shitty user experience. If they have been around that website for a while, as it was moved from some other forum software to Discourse, they are going to blame your software. They are going to blame you and they are going to blame your developers. They are not going to have any idea about the JS issues on Android and if you try to explain it to them they are not going to care. "It worked fine before we switched."
You need a dedicated developer for mobile. You need to be serving a completely different website to people on mobile. Responsive web design has its time and place, but it is not a panacea. It will only get you so far, and in the case of Discourse that is nowhere near far enough.
You can keep kicking this can down the road...
Hopefully their Android V8 fixes will land in the next 6-12 months.
...and apparently that is exactly your plan? But here is the thing, the majority of your end-users have a shitty mobile experience. If you look at 1-2 generation old iOS devices, the benchmarks that have been posted earlier show a shitty user experience for them also. Their "load to a usable state" benchmark shows that it takes over 1.5 seconds. You are a smart guy, you know those times need to be solidly under 1 second. Your veterans of a particular forum will stick around (as we all have), when a user experience gets progressively shittier. New users just finding a forum won't though.
You have talked about how much information is in forums and that is usually where I do when I need to find an expert in an obscure area. New users find those communities, not because they think "Hey, I want to join an online community about $NEWINTEREST." No, they think, "Hey, $NEWINTEREST is pretty cool. Let me go Google that." and then through a keyword search they land in a forum thread, they join, they ask questions and before long they organically become a part of the community. This is the power of forum software. By the nature of the discussions, you will end up with active communities that have good information ending up higher in relevant Google search results.
Here is the problem for you: John or Jane Doe is somewhere away from a desktop or laptop computer, perhaps on their lunch break in a cafe or something. They pull out their phone to Google $NEWINTEREST, a Discourse thread lands as a top result for their search string and they tap on it...and wait...and wait...and stare at the stupid fucking spinner. Then they hit the back button and go to an older forum software that loads nearly instantly.
You know that as loading times become >500ms, the conversion rate starts to plummet. We are an instant gratification society. We want it now, and we will go somewhere else if it does not show up quickly enough. What kind of impression is it when new users just see a perpetual spinner? They are going to go somewhere else. They don't fucking care that it is an Android V8 issue. They just know that it is a shitty user experience, and they will go elsewhere.
I honestly have no idea how long it takes between "Google engineer working on Chrome checks in fix" and "fix deployed to end users as a version of Chrome".
Who cares? Listen, we get it. This is a forum for developers. We know it is an Android V8 issue and even we don't fucking care. All I care about is that this forum is completely unusable on my Galaxy S5 that is only a few months old. We don't care because we know that this is not an Android V8 issue, this is a shitty user experience issue.
Stop waiting for Google to fix your problems and triage the problem right now. Start stripping shit out when you serve a site to mobile. You should also really consider if you need to change JS frameworks because Ember performance is shit, across the board. You know as well as anyone here that these decisions become harder to change the longer you go on.
We cut the number of topics and replies loaded at once in half, so that gets it closer to the original values at least.
No, it doesn't. I still get the perpetual loading spinner. It is not a matter of how many replies get loaded in at a time.
Do a sunk cost analysis on your development efforts so far. If you were starting Discourse today, would you still go with RoR, Ember.JS, etc? If so, carry on about your work. If you would change something if you were to start today, then change it now. You are ending up with technological debt, and you are too early on for that.
I am going to stop now. I could go on and on, but you are not going to read 1/10th of this anyway.
Addendum: And change the damned layout back so that I can Tab+Enter to submit. That is really annoying me.
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@codinghorror, one further thing. You should fix this issue regardless of whether or not an update to Android V8 will fix the issue. Fix it because it will triage the issue right now, and it will lead to a better user experience for *everyone on mobile. If/when the Android V8 team fixes their JS woes, your software will still be better. If you wait around for someone else to resolve your issues, you will never progress as quickly as if you take care of it yourself.
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Also, unlike iOS, android phones typically don't get OS upgrades.
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android phones typically don't get OS upgrades
Huh? Is this something that the lower-end phones don't get? I am on my fifth or sixth Android phone and every single one of them has gotten at least one major version upgrade while I have had it. After 2 years, you are basically screwed as the carrier drops their support for the phone, but that is really no different than iPhone in many ways. iPhones are paper weights after two years.
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@Intercourse said:
Huh? Is this something that the lower-end phones don't get? I am on my fifth or sixth Android phone and every single one of them has gotten at least one major version upgrade while I have had it. After 2 years, you are basically screwed as the carrier drops their support for the phone, but that is really no different than iPhone in many ways. iPhones are paper weights after two years.
Both of the Androids that I have have had OS updates...
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Both of the Androids that I have have had OS updates...
Perhaps @PleegWat was referring to lower-end Android devices? I always buy the latest and greatest when I get a new phone. I have no idea if the $0-$50 phones get upgrades? I could see how if you bought a Galaxy S3 right now that it would probably not ever get an update, but the high-end phones always get them, to my knowledge.
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I've seen comparisons (C'T). Typically iOS devices are up-to-date when sold, and get about 2 OS upgrades, typically immediately when apple releases them.
Android devices may or may not be up to date when sold, and you can expect about 1 OS upgrade on high-end. Low end, or provider-specific roms typically don't get updated at all.
This may be different on the US market. Numbers are from memory but the drift is iOS updates are definitely better.
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Typically iOS devices are up-to-date when sold, and get about 2 OS upgrades, typically immediately when apple releases them.
That number means less when you realize that the second update kills the performance of the device and apparently swaps out the battery for an asthmatic hamster in a wheel...who also has diabetes and is morbidly obese.
Low end, or provider-specific roms typically don't get updated at all.
That could very well be, I buy high-end phones. I like cool stuff and nifty toys.
This may be different on the US market.
Oh, you are from one of the green parts of not-America. I have no clue then. As an American, my worldview ends at our borders. It is the 'murican way. ;)
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The perpetual loading spinner was due to malformed HTML sometimes appearing in Suggested Topics. That was fixed today. (Newer Ember versions are more sensitive to malformed HTML".
So yes, cutting the number of topics and posts loaded at once in half does help. That is the shorter term fix. See my original observations here from a year ago.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-is-discourse-so-slow-on-android/8823
Look for the words "substantially faster on small topics.." and now all topics are fairly small, since the chunk size was halved for Android.
This is a long term game. Open source, well, that's how it works. Takes time to get fixes pushed upstream.
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The perpetual loading spinner was due to malformed HTML sometimes appearing in Suggested Topics.
Why was this not caught during testing? This was not an "every great once in a while" error. It was almost constant. I will see how the fix works out, but this is a bug that would never have gotten out in to the wild if someone had picked up a damn smartphone and loaded a few threads. If a person in my employ makes a commit and pushes to production a change that causes an application of ours to completely shit itself, regularly, for a large portion of my users...I will be fucking livid.
I know this has been beat to death around here, but do you even do any testing on the latest branch? I really fail to see how something like this could ever make it in to the repo. That is horribly sloppy. It would have taken 30 seconds to find that there is a problem. I knew that something was wrong the very next time I visited this forum after the update.
(Newer Ember versions are more sensitive to malformed HTML".
Not to be a total dick, but why are you sending malformed HTML out anyway?
Also, it appears I was correct when I said:
@Intercourse said:
I could go on and on, but you are not going to read 1/10th of this anyway.
Discourse performance on mobile, across the board, is horrible. Absolutely horrible. You need to get your loading times under 1s. Preferably, they should be around or less than 500ms. Past 500ms, your conversion rates plummet. You know that. One day soon you will hopefully realize that the only way you are going to get there on mobile is to serve them a different site. I get it, that sucks. You are going to have another partial codebase to maintain. You are going to have another dev to babysit. You are going to have new bugs pop up. Shit happens man, but you better start it sooner rather than later and dump Ember when you do so because it is a rubbish framework.
Do a search here for "Ember shit itself" and see how many results you get. It is a colloquialism on TDWTF. For you, that should be unacceptable for something like that to become a part of the lexicon for a community running your software.
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Discourse mobile performance is fucking amazing on iOS. And getting substantially better every year.
We are doing what we can to help Android catch up, on a number of fronts. Better Android web experiences benefit everyone.
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Discourse mobile performance is fucking amazing on iOS. And getting substantially better every year.
It is, for the latest and greatest models. What about those running 4S and 5's? Load times are well over a second. On an iPhone 6, sure the load time is just a bit over a half second. That is a good response time. But most people are not running the latest and greatest phone. You still have the problem of a LOT of people having a bad user experience, or at least sub-optimal.
But that still does not change that Android has an 82% market share, and most of those are not latest gen devices like mine. @lucas is a developer and he is still running an S3. My cousin is also, he is also a developer and he currently sees no real reason to upgrade because "It does everything he needs it to do." He apparently does not visit many websites that serve Ember.JS framework to mobile devices though...
You cannot base your benchmarks only on the latest and greatest. You need to get on eBay and pick up some iPhone 4S and Galaxy S3 devices and have them test on there also. That is the UX that most people are going to see. Sure, you and I can afford to drop $300/year on the latest and greatest new gadgety phone, but most people cannot. Those people are still going to visit Discourse sites.
Better Android web experiences benefit everyone.
Well, not everyone. At least not in any sort of timely manner. As was pointed out to me earlier in this thread, cheap Android phones may never get an OS upgrade. So let's think about this: If it takes 6-12 months for Google to get their shit together and fix the performance on V8, then someone who has just bought a $50 Android phone will still be 2+ years out from that date before ever seeing a benefit. That means people with cheap smartphones will have a shitty UX for the next 3 years!!!
But, you know what, that is your deal. I don't care. I like shiny new tech and I am fortunate enough to be able to afford it. If you fixed the loading spinner (and wrote a test before you did? You did write a test, didn't you? To prevent another regression making it in to the latest branch?), then fix the layout change that killed me being able to hit Tab+Enter to submit a post. That has been annoying the shit out of me for the past two days.
Seriously. That change in UI is slowly turning me in to @blakeyrat, and no one wants that. Especially not me.
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@Intercourse said:
It is, for the latest and greatest models. What about those running 4S and 5's? Load times are well over a second. On an iPhone 6, sure the load time is just a bit over a half second.
There are 3 people in my office with iPhones; a fourth will probably get one in a few months when she upgrades to a smartphone. None of them have--or will have--the latest. I think two of them have 5s (not the 5S, two people who both have a 5.) One of those just got it a few months ago--before that she had a 3GS. This is typical of what I've observed in the wild, too.
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You don't need an OS upgrade, just the latest version of Chrome from the Play store.
Interesting contrast with Apple where new versions of the browser only come with the OS and OS point updates.
Now who was it that used to tell us the browser was part of the OS? Oh yeah, Microsoft! ;)
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Discourse mobile performance is fucking amazing on iOS. And getting substantially better every year.
Here's an idea:
How about instead of bragging because Apple did a ton of work to make your product performance edge into the "barely acceptable" category, how about you be ashamed as shit that it's still significantly slower than Community Server circa 2008? You know, the product that frequently downloaded megabytes of junk during page loads?
You know, you said you started this project because other web forums sucked. I'm not convinced you've ever used another web forum in your life. Because the only emotion you should be feeling right now is intense shame-- shame that the idiots who shat out Community Server did a better job than you.
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To be fair, those guys were geniuses. I hear Knuth worked on some of the Community Server algorithms.
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Ha ha ha! Deflect that perfectly reasonable criticism with humor! Make sure whatever happens, nothing penetrates the 10' of nuclear-bunker-grade concrete ego surrounding that squishy little brain!
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Ok now I am really laughing. You bring such joy to life, @blakeyrat. I can't wait to play Battlefield: Hardline with you next March.
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You bring such joy to life, @blakeyrat
You take that back, you piece of shit. I make life miserable for everybody and you fucking know it.
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OK fine that is mostly true, but you have your charms at times.
lets run away together
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Another user that @blakeyrat must get a room with...
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Too bad the PDA thread is in the lounge.
