Faster, Faster!
DESPITE the upgrade and migration dating back to September (it had been planned since 2022), we continue to make improvements to the archives (still finding some imperfections in the conversions from WordPress to our own system, superseded by a static page generator) and we've enhanced the caching to speed up the site a little more, more latterly with CacheEnable in Apache2. Assuming the visitor has a fast connection, pages should take about a second to load. There's network latency of course (time for packets to travel back and forth), but that one we cannot 'fix' unless we serve the site from many different locations around the world (some sites have foolishly outsourced to CDNs like ClownFlare for that, ignoring the huge hidden cost associated with such a move).
Here is Techrights accessed from Tokyo, Japan (fast connection but just about as far as it gets):
Site speed is important not just for superficial stuff like "rankings"; it makes navigation a lot more pleasant as readers don't get overly impatient or too "lazy" to click on further links.
If many "mainstream" sites were responsive when we all used dial-up modems (or over 90% of us did), then it is more than feasible to do this with broadband/fibre. It's a matter of how the site is built, managed, and served. A "suite" or a CMS like WordPress should be considered bloat (both the administration side with JavaScript all over the place and the readers' side too). Using CDNs and aggressive caching isn't always feasible and it's mostly a hack anyway; dedicating almost a hundred CPU cores to the task (yes, we were there before) isn't just economically costly but also bad for the environment.
As noted two days ago: "We're finally free (as in freedom, independence) from Drupal, WordPress and MediaWiki. We'll never come back to them."
Those bloated systems also ruin the planet, albeit perhaps not to the extent Bitcoin and LLMs do; the difference is, Drupal, WordPress and MediaWiki were probably installed about 100 million times and it all adds up (quantity of instances). It's one thing to really appreciate about Gemini; both the client side and the server site are conservative resources-wise and generous in the freedom sense. Our Gemini Edition still receives many requests and Gemini continues to grow.
I grew up into a generation where computers were not connected by default. We had to add a modem on our own. We needed to learn how to install it (or get somebody to do that for us). We had to learn things the hard way and it paid off skills-wise. It opened up job opportunities.
I worked for about 3-4 years at MCC (home of the first GNU/Linux distro, named "MCC" too), essentially supporting dial-up and VPN users - that is university staff such as lecturers working from home and requiring access to the intranet, library etc. The speed of their connection, assuming no ISDN, was about 1,000 times slower than what we have today. No site in 2024 should take more than 2 seconds to load. No more than 1 CPU core should be required either. █