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Pages are loading slowly for me

We take a lot of steps to make sure our site performs quickly for as many users as possible. Here is a short outline of what we've done, how it should perform, and what you can do to help us track down an issue if the site is loading slowly for you.

Infrastructure: (technical)


We are hosted with heroku, a salesforce company, they have many of the top engineers in the world making sure the platform is working and staying on the cutting edge of technology and performance.

It's utilizing Amazon infrastructure under the hood, including load balancers, and nginx.

Then our app utilizes memcached and an amazon cloudfront CDN as well as cloudflare in front of the whole thing.

If you watch the network inspector in your browser while clicking around you'll see compressed assets with cache keys in the file names, you'll see most assets served from cloudront, and hopefully no blocking requests from external javascripts/fonts we've loaded.

The servers we are using are located in the Virginia USA datacenter, and our team is on the west coast. Our browsing times should resemble what most users in the USA should be able to see, although international browsing will vary.

How it should feel

Here is a short youtube video in realtime, showing what we think a normal experience should be while using our site.



What you will see in this video is most pages loading under 2 seconds. Our site average is actually 3 seconds, but that is because some countries that use the site a lot have a huge latency and bring the average up.

Here are some averages by Country for reference



Troubleshooting


If you are seeing speeds much slower than these, and it's going on for more than a few minutes (the internet does fluctuate, beyond what any of us control), then you can help debug by browsing the site with your Chrome network inspector pulled out. That will show what different parts of the page load and how long they take - it looks like this.



You can access the network inspector by selecting "View" on the Chrome Menubar, then Developer > Developer Tools, and then selecting the network tab.

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