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GitHub Pages with a custom root domain is slow

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Re: GitHub Pages with a custom root domain is slow

#31

Post by Joeboy »

krenoten wrote: post #29
Joeboy wrote: post #13

Is 5s really such a problem? I don't think I'd bail out of a website because it took 5s to load, unless it was something I didn't particularly want to see anyway. Which I guess might be why people didn't stick around for the tests from which the 35% number is drawn.

Yes. Numerous reputable entities have published reports demonstrating that users notice quite a lot. Amazon claims that every 100ms costs them 1% of revenue. Google claims 500ms costs them 20% of traffic. 5 seconds is a fucking eternity, and anything you expose to users on the web with such horrible performance will suffer greatly because of if. One exception may be banks. Users are more forgiving of latency as their…

I guess I find this plausible if we're talking about n ms multiplied by the number of resources loaded, and your page doesn't render progressively. If we're talking about total load time, I don't see why you'd even bother clicking a link if you weren't prepared to wait a few seconds for it to load.

Edit: in the case of Google and Amazon, I can believe that being slow will cause users to defect to other services. I don't believe that anybody will not bother to read documentation because it takes a second to load.

Edit2: If this is true, can anybody explain why users behave in this seemingly bizarre way? Do you give up on pages after 500ms? Have you seen anybody else do that? What is going on?

Re: GitHub Pages with a custom root domain is slow

#32

Post by cmalpeli »

As I understand it, this is a similar issue on any app hosted on Heroku. You need to CNAME to WWW and then 301 redirect non WWW to WWW. Alternatively you can use DNS providers such as DNSimple who support ALIAS records.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/moving-to-the-current-...

Re: GitHub Pages with a custom root domain is slow

#35

Post by emidln »

dublinben wrote: post #4

I think that this can vary quite a bit. My simple GitHub page loads in roughly 1 second. I don't think it's ever taken as long as 5 seconds. The linked site loads in less than half a second, but it costs $5 a month just for a simple page.

Came here to say that. My github page (just flat html) loads in ~65ms. Granted, 65ms to load a couple kb of text isn't awesome, but it's not nearly slow enough to optimize for me.

Re: GitHub Pages with a custom root domain is slow

#36

Post by VLM »

Joeboy wrote: post #13

Is 5s really such a problem? I don't think I'd bail out of a website because it took 5s to load, unless it was something I didn't particularly want to see anyway. Which I guess might be why people didn't stick around for the tests from which the 35% number is drawn.

I would imagine less serious viewers will drop off quicker than motivated viewers.

Nothing can stop me if I need to buy something on Amazon or need to pay a bill online. If I'm just filling time and here's three interesting links to "fad of the day (hour?)" then slowest link might lose.

A simple A/B tester could insert an additional 50 ms to half the requests and some data analysis could calculate the slope of the graph in that area. Assuming that slope is perfectly linear for no good reason at extremes like 1500 seconds or 0.0000001 nanoseconds would be unwise.

Re: GitHub Pages with a custom root domain is slow

#39

Post by walesmd »

lazerwalker wrote: post #27
davidcelis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not necessarily true. My own site is a Jekyll site. To host that on S3, I'd need to generate it first and upload the generated files as opposed to my source files. Now that's not really a big deal, but I do enjoy the convenience of only having to do a `git push` to deploy my site on Pages. That being said, I notice times similar to another commenter above, around 1-2s usually. I don't think I've seen a five se…

This sounds like the sort of thing that could easily be automated using a five-line Bash (Ruby, Python, etc) script.

I do something very similar to this, using Wintersmith and shell scripts. It essentially boils down to using two repositories for my site: the first being the raw/ungenerated files including the shell scripts, the second being the generated files that are served by GitHub pages.
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