This issue and more have been corrected. Added the media embeds to full screen and a pop-out player.
Also added lazy loading of media and images - this allows only the images in viewport to load, saving you bandwidth/data on your phone if you don't care about the rest of the thread/etc while also improving page load speed.
With all our local assets being served through AWS/S3, I added multiple Cloudfront layer to cache out on their edge network as well, which means improved content distribution, where ever you are. CDN, JS, and Logo subdomains are all on cloudfront if you want to hit F12, reload the page on the network tab and watch stuff like a nerd
I've also added an image optimizer. You may have noticed attachments take another second or two after reaching 100% uploaded before showing. This is because the server is re-processing those images and scaling your 100 megapixel cat pic into a web-friendly size without suffering quality.
I've rebuilt all our images already, and no one has noticed. But I reduced our image size by over 25GB. This means faster loading of the smaller size images, and a lower bill for S3 transfer costs. These processors are libs installed locally. There are hosted providers that are reasonable now that the mass-update has taken place that I'm considering.
So, now that all these intensive services are being offloaded from our core server, the server itself is WAY too powerful for what we need.
I will be downgrading to a cheaper box at some point this year. I've been shopping for a new provider. It's been a challenge. There's few places I trust these days that aren't expensive or pure cloud-node, and i'm not sure that we're ready for a container-based node as our sole platform. It's nt ready... i'm not ready. too many things still to offload (DNS, email, etc) before that could be a reality.
All in all, with the caching work, SSL, and other enhancements, i've improved the speed of the site by almost double.
over 6 seconds at the end of march
View this on WebPageTest.org...
www.webpagetest.org
to around 4
View this on WebPageTest.org...
www.webpagetest.org
today
Time to first bite is all server and connectivity. Being on SSL, it's naively twice as slow as it has to confirm the handshake. And, we're still on apache which is not the fastest web server out there any more
The long term vision is to move to 100% AWS + 3rd party api's. Lot's of planning and figuring out the right size instances before making the jump.
Move the database to
RDS/Aurora
move email to
SES
DNS on
Route53
Main app on
EC2 and probably behind EBS
image optimization on
Kraken.io