The forum system is fucking slow

I apologize DevHC, I’m having difficulty following your thoughts and it makes replying to everything difficult. As you mentioned, I’m not knowledgeable about software engineering so I have no idea about Discourse’s “speed” relative to “what it should be”.

What I do know is that if Discourse’s performance is truly an issue, people would avoid using the site or atleast people would complain about it more. I haven’t seen evidence of either of these things happening. That doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t happening, but we can’t know for sure one way or the other. Perhaps a poll created by you would help.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that enough people here are browsing this site with “recent” (within the past 5+ years) devices, explaining why we don’t see people complain about it. It doesn’t make up for “sloppy programming” but it does make the “problem” alot easier to dismiss. As mentioned on their FAQ:

Discourse is designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum browser requirements are high

In my anecdotal case, Discourse runs fine across 3 “recent” devices. Discourse never claimed to run well on old computers. Its a forum system that attempts to be “modern” with features from websites like Youtube/Facebook such as real-time notifications and post drafts. This is the direction GrangerHub is going and if you disagree, feel free to bring it up.

Going back to your OP:

Dropping/Moving all content on GrangerHub to a new system (one that you never specified) doesn’t seem like a good idea just because it doesn’t perform to “what it should be” and its made by “amateurs”. Terms that are vague and well, not really an issue worth dropping Discourse for.

This is why I’m having trouble agreeing with you. It seems like you are arguing about principle than practicality.

I agree that such comparison should be retarded and completely pointless. A video game should be orders of magnitude more complex than a web browser displaying a bunch of text and images in 2D, but that’s not the case.

Sure, the forum scrolls at 60 FPS on most devices, but look how fucking expensive this seemingly simple operation is. Even the GPU is working hard (with its usage between 15-50%) just to show me some text on a background.

I agree with @DevHC that computers being fast is a shitty excuse for this kind of sloppy programming, but I wouldn’t blame Discourse specifically. Everything web-related runs like shit.

Takes about 12 secs to ‘first load’ or ‘initialize’ (whether term you prefer) discourse for me, and then opening a thread takes about 4 secs each, and the scrolling is painful. Obviously using a craptop doesn’t help, but those numbers are significantly lower with most of the things I do in web browsing. Yes, this is pretty painful.

I don’t think it’s slow. Please provide proof. I have never had trouble loading OR using this forum. It seems to only be you, in which case, you’re WRONG!!!

A website being slow for a person using a fringe device isn’t sloppy programming, it’s considering diminishing returns. If you make an Android app in this day and age, you would consider ignoring Android 2.2 devices so you can use more modern Android features in your app. It’s the same thing for websites; if you ignore people with shit computers, you can put out a higher quality product for the people who actually matter.

FURTHERMORE, I have seen no evidence that recentness of device MATTERS. Bird has a shitty piece of shit and only gets 20 fps on fucking nano in Trem, but he has NEVER complained about this forum. Again, it seems you are simply WRONGNNGNG!!!1!!

WRONGGNGNG!!! they all hav experinece programing for years clearly they arent amateurs

Correct.

Takes about 3 seconds to ‘first load’ or ‘initialize’ (your terms are shit) discourse for me, and then opening a thread takes about 1 sec each maximum, and the scrolling is only painful if I’m scrolling past things before the previous things load (and even then it’s not bad). If you want to scroll to the bottom of a thread, just click the time on the right side.

Being on a laggy computer makes comparing loading times easier since it just stretches everything up. It doesn’t even take half the time it takes discourse to load a thread to load a video on youtube on my end. As for the bar on the right, it makes me freeze vs just very choppy scrolling if I use the wheel.

what sort of proof ? i’m not going to camera-record a displayed loading session. discourse is very slow.

not believing the claims (that it takes 10 seconds to load a page here) is an issue outside the scope of this discussion.

ignorance is futile.

that depends on the website. in this case, there is nothing that technologically necessitates such a low performance.

DO U CONSIDER THE OPPORTUNITY, TO USE TWICE AS MUCH CPU POWER (MADE POSSIBLE BY A CPU THAT COSTS TWICE AS MUCH AND USES TWICE AS MUCH ELECTRICITY), A FEATURE, WHICH ENABLES PROGRAMMERS TO SLACK OFF MORE ? (i was just rephrasing myself.)

he needs to learn to speak up. but first, he needs to learn computer science to identify that the performance issue is not only due to his computer, not the set of features this forum system uses, but also the crappyness of its code.

well, SMF is fairly workable on this end.

Something worth considering is if something like SMF fits into what GrangerHub is trying to do. We already had Trem.net for SMF for years and its not exactly the easiest thing to go into anymore like its still 2007.

GrangerHub is trying to be “modern” so it uses Discourse so discussions can be consumed on newer devices and phones, to appeal to old players who moved on and new players using more recent devices. Post drafts, real-time notifications, Youtube URLs, phone/tablet support, DPI scaling, etc are the kind of features we’re seeing on websites like Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr, Reddit, etc (I’m speaking about the technical aspects of these sites, not their content).

Now whether or not that’ll be successful is up in the air until Tremulous 1.3 ( inb4 Menace, yes I know, IF it gets released ), but I don’t think everyone is keen on going back to something like Shadow Machine Forums. Not without alot of modifications (AKA time, money and effort while Discourse has a modern frontend and backend out of the box).

On the other hand, SMF has its backend written in PHP. Now that’s a fucking waste of resources.

congratulations, u have successfully confused browser requirements with system requirements.

• browser requirements: eg., support for HTML5, JavaScript, CSS rendering filters, content-security policy, strict transport security, etc.
• system requirements: eg., Micro-and-Soft® Verve© Ϟ–④™ / NSA-OS2 or compatible operating system, Intel® Realium©77™ or equivalent general processor, Nvidia® Ferizite©20™ or equivalent graphics card / hyperparallel processor / FPGA device, 50NW¹ scent cooker mechanoplate or equivalent, 50TiB cloud storage authority, treaty-licensed wormhole spawner device capable of capturing a quantum-space entanglement permitting 92000c information transmission speed, etc.

¹ niggawatt

do u plan to rewrite Discourse, or at least to drastically improve its performance ?

SMF cannot be consumed on newer devices ? this is pure bullshit.

this obviously refers to small display dimensions. SMF is not responsive,² and is hardly even elastic, but basic browserwindow-scaling tests show that neither is Discourse.

² not to be confused with response times, really

also in SMF (embedded videos r allowed via a plugin; i interpreted „DPI scaling” as base font-size scaling, which is a general browser feature — the only thing a website can do is to actively fuck it up).

is that a much-needed feature, despite the fact that forum systems r not intended to be a real-time communications platform ?

btw, is there any particular reason why u’re calling SMF „Shadow Machine Forums” instead of „Simple Machines Forum” ?

My bad.

That was fucking hilarious. I wish I have an Nvidia Ferizite tho.

Nope. As long as it runs adequately enough on the majority of people browsing the site, its not my problem.

Okay. But Discourse still scales on phones and tablets as if its a native app. I don’t think SMF does that and if it did, I wasn’t aware of it.

Needed = necessary? No, but its a feature that Discourse has that makes life easier. Like I said before, Discourse is doing things alot of other popular social media sites are doing and applying that to a forum. If we argued what features are necessary for forums, then we could go back to BBS for maximum efficiency.

Force of habit.

So our forum is what kind of webpage source we used?

I agree your point.

The main website ( http://grangerhub.org ) uses a system called WordPress, the forums ( http://forum.grangerhub.org ) uses a system called Discourse. Those two systems are integrated with each other.

The forum has been updated, which supposedly has some fixes for performance. Is it still slow?

I don’t seem to notice any difference between then and now. Then again, I guess its something a less optimal setup might notice.

wishful thinking.

Not answering the question adequately when he is atleast trying to help doesn’t improve the case you’re trying to make.

Did the forum “speed” improve in any way whatsoever for you personally?

what part of „wishful thining” did u fail to understand ? not only does that answer the question,¹ it also sounds off that hoping for complete-revamp-style performance improvements in basic updates is laughable.

¹ could the answer really be expected to „yes”, if the relevant proposition is wishful thinking, and at least 1 user had already reported with a „no” ?