31–40 of 45 posts
I'm from South Africa. I'm not sure if they cache Google+ here (I know they cache YouTube) or use a CDN, but I've found Google+ to do exactly this. It's slow, and sometimes stuff just doesn't load (especially images). It's strange, because Google+ is the first social network I've seen that actually promotes itself on my campus (large installs with lifesize Angry Birds).
Just out of interest, what is the life size of an angry bird?
About half the time, it just fails to load, as if there's some agressive timeout in its SSL.
When it does load, it shares an annoying behavior with an increasing number of sites, of displaying a white-on-white page, with only icons visible, until some stylesheet loads at the very end, at which point it can finally be read.
I suspect there is also javascript that times out or fails to gracefully handle failure to load some resources. I've never seen the flashy bling that people were talking about when G+ launched.
Oh, and as a SSL-only site, it of course defeats entirely all my local web caching.
To give some idea of how slow it is, I've had a single G+ page loading the entire time I typed this. Still consists of a white-on-white page.
I have, in some instances, needed to ssh to a fast remote server, and read G+ via w3m when there was a link I really wanted to read.
In contrast, when I click on a HN page, it comes up with very little discernable delay. The rare times I go to facebook, it may take it a minute to come up, but it always loads.
Around 5% of the US population still uses dialup.
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Depends what you mean by "local infrastructure". Up until recently east Africa dint have a fiber link to the rest of the internet, it was all satilite. Forget last miles, this is the last 1000 miles.
For those interested in the current and planned undersea cable infrastructure, there's a good SVG diagram on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cable_map18.svg
It's not just Google+, by the way. All of Google's services are noticeably slower after they switched to the new look that Google's changing everything to. Bad move in my opinion. We don't care if the pages are very pretty, Google. We just want what we want.
A few years ago they started promoting best practices [0] and after following it + checking with Audit/pagespeed I got performance increases. Now it seems they abandoned their own best practices. Running an audit on a google page results in a lot of red/orange bullets.
[0] https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rule...
Can't comment on Google Plus, I kept my account for about 2 days. Not terrible or anything, the value proposition just wasn't there for me.
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The post is from Zimbabwe so do you mean Southern Africa?
Unlikely, south Africa is quite an outlier in Africa. Southern Africa is usually taken to include it an lots of other countries (eg. Tanzania). That as a group, is jot an outlier within Africa.
I'm not in Africa, but I do have slow (dialup) internet in the US, and every G+ link is a nightmare. About half the time, it just fails to load, as if there's some agressive timeout in its SSL. When it does load, it shares an annoying behavior with an increasing number of sites, of displaying a white-on-white page, with only icons visible, until some stylesheet loads at the very end, at which point it can finally be…
The assets cache just fine, SSL or not.
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Fair enough, I agree that the author was guilty of the kind of continent-wide generalisations that's always misleading. I was just a bit confused by the parent post's reference to South Africa, which was a bit off-topic as the author is from Zimbabwe. My assumption was that there were two possible explanations, that the post's author confused South Africa with Southern Africa, or that they considered South Africa to…
I'm the author. Indeed Zimbabwe is not representative of all Africa. However, Zimbabwe actually has better internet that most African countries. At least it's in the top 10 of 54 countries on the continent according to Ookla ( http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/ ) If Zimbabwe's internet is bad enough to cause users problems loading Google+, It's likely worse in the majority of the countries on the continen…
> Maybe providing a ‘Google+ Lite’? Have you tried the mobile website? Is it any better? http://m.google.com/app/plus
I'm not in Africa, but I do have slow (dialup) internet in the US, and every G+ link is a nightmare. About half the time, it just fails to load, as if there's some agressive timeout in its SSL. When it does load, it shares an annoying behavior with an increasing number of sites, of displaying a white-on-white page, with only icons visible, until some stylesheet loads at the very end, at which point it can finally be…
> Oh, and as a SSL-only site, it of course defeats entirely all my local web caching. The assets cache just fine, SSL or not.