Simpler Means Faster
Do you know your bottlenecks?
In 2022 we moved Tux Machines to an early version of our SSG and a year later we did the same here. Drupal was a pain in the arse (very slow), WordPress required a lot of maintenance, and MediaWiki was being hammered by bots, triggering high loads but not spam (we had already obstructed edits due to massive spikes in spam).
We've since then improved the sites' speed, which depends more on the network than on site-related bloat (CSS files, images etc.) and short of setting up proxies in all sorts of places (like another server in Japan for South Korean or Japanese visitors) there's little that can be done to speed things up other than ensuring each request is served within milliseconds and the files take little time to render in most browsers (that too has an element of latency).
The average site is served from one location, so network overheads are a factor only upstream providers (ISPs and hosts) can reduce. That ought not exempt sites from the expected care for simplicity. Very few sites bother profiling those sorts of things to identify and tackle bottlenecks.
One upside of Gemini Protocol is speed. Based on today's Lupa statistics, there will soon be over 5,000 known capsules. â–ˆ
Image source: Thomas Smillie