Micro blog loading slow from EU, Asia, and AU

Thanks for this great service @manton. You have thought of everything.

Thanks for such an ingenious service. It certainly fills a big vacuum.

I really love the backing up our blog on archive.org and github features.

The only issue I am seeing before going for the paid plans is the speed of my micro-blog loading outside of USA, even though there is only one post on my micro-blog with just one sentence.

New York: 507.15 ms
San Fransisco: 723.25 ms
London: 1.34 s
Frankfurt: 2.07 s
Bangalore: 2.86 s
Tokyo: 1.77 s
Sydney: 2.48 s

It seems your servers are in USA and there is no CDN being used.

Doesn’t a global blog service need a CDN to reduce loading times from around the world?

Do you plan to upgrade your infrastructure to a CDN and when?

Another question I had.

What is the maximum limit for the number of characters allowed for text posts?

1 Like

Thanks! What are you using for those measurements? On https://status.micro.blog, I’m currently seeing 199ms from Los Angeles, 532ms from France, and 793ms from Tokyo. We’ve evaluated some CDNs and may provide that as an option, but in practice I think Micro.blog-hosted blogs load quickly because they tend to have fewer resources than other blog hosts.

There is no character limit. Posts that are less than 280 characters fit nicely in the Micro.blog timeline. If a post is over 280 characters, you can add a title field and make it a full-length blog post.

Thanks for the reply @manton. I used the https://tools.keycdn.com/speed KeyCDN tool. It gives very accurate results. You can try it for any new micro blog.

Bunny.net is as awesome super-fast ping-time CDN with its quite cheap geo-duplicated storage so the CDN cache-ratio is always 100% even if the files are not loaded from the CDN cache.

It will make micro blogs and your entire service blazingly fast from anywhere in the world. Maybe it will prove cheaper to you than your Linode servers. Thanks again.

This is becoming a bit of a frustration for me using MB in the UK. It takes a long time for the pages of my MB to load, currently 10s for page 1 and 48s for page 2, assuming the media isn’t aren’t already cached on my machine. Loading my photos page is essentially unusable, it takes over 13 minutes and even then a bunch of the images actually just fail. This is the same experience when browsing other MB user’s photo pages too and of course just gets worse as I add more photos.

Completely not an expert in this realm, but a localised CDN, a way to load thumbnails rather than full images (usually between 1.5MB and 3MB) or maybe pagination or scrolling load of photos page would make this a whole lot better.

I’ve toyed with trying to find a way to resize/compress images on my phone before I upload, but that doesn’t seem the right way to go about this.

Thank you! :pray:

Lately my MB is loading very slow and the photos page seems to never finish the loading proces completely. I’m in the Netherlands, Europe. When I first started out on MB the loading times were much better. I wonder what happened?

Could it be that we discuss different things in this thread? I find it a bit confusing. :blush: The posts are all related to speed and performance, but the underlying issues – and potential fixes – differ.

How we experience speed on the web depends on many parameters. Some of them are:

  • How fast the network connection between you and Micro.blog is. This depends on your internet service provider, Micro.blog’s ISP, and how good or bad the connection between them are.
  • How much data is sent over the connection? For example, a tiny about page, mainly consisting of text, will load a lot faster than an image gallery.
  • How heavy is the website on the “client-side”? If the theme has many complex or poorly implemented CSS rules or JavaScript, the user experience can feel slow. In this case, upgrading to a faster network connection won’t load the website faster. (Though, upgrading your device may speed things up.)

So, when we say our Micro.blog hosted website loads slow, what do we really mean?

Let’s take @niekhockx’s blog as an example. Hope you don’t mind. :blush: I started loading the photos page and… it’s pretty heavy:

Website statistics. 803 resources at 625 MB.

When I took the screenshot above, the page was still loading. :sweat_smile: So it’s at least 625 MB. That’s not a small amount to download, approaching the size of a CD (if anyone remembers those).

A page like that will always load slow, even when on a reasonably fast connection. And independent of where you are in the world. Think minutes of download time, not seconds.

Let’s look at another resource on that blog: the JSON feed. It’s text-only and weighs in at around 10 kB. Today, from where I’m located in Sweden, that file loads in about 200 ms. Not super fast, but not exceptionally slow either.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this. :blush: I would love if @manton spun up servers or used a CDN closer to us here in Europe. But, until then, there are things we can do ourselves to speed up our blogs. Like:

  • Make sure we make images and other resources reasonably sized before uploading.
  • Paginate galleries and listings. Instead of showing all images, maybe show 10 at a time.
  • If you’re handy with templates, you could have Micro.blog create thumbnails of your photos on gallery pages.
  • If you have your own domain pointing to your Micro.blog hosted blog and like to tinker, you could use a service like Cloudflare to accelerate your site. There are features like automatic image optimization and resource distribution over a content delivery network.

Paginating and thumbnails are already standard in the template design I use. The photos page is all thumbnails. But it looks like thumbnails are also randomly skipped during loading. I’m afraid I still don’t get it… and it used to be better.

Yes, you’re right; the photos page is all thumbnails in the sense that they are displayed small by the browser. But many of them aren’t actually small (in terms of resolution and file size). Instead, the browser downloads the full resolution images, some as big as 3–4 MB, and then scales them down to the tiny thumbnails on the visitor’s device.

The random skipping you experience is probably just your browser choking on the workload. Give it enough time; all of the almost 800 images will download and render. But it will probably take a while, depending on your network connection and hardware.

To speed up that gallery, you would have to split it up on multiple pages and preferably make actual thumbnails, lower the resolution. Either manually or – if you’re comfortable with custom templates – automatically using the technique, I linked to above.

We’ve been doing some testing with different image sizes to try to improve this. Also, a recent server upgrade caused some caches of images to not be as complete as they used to be, which is likely a big part of any slowdown with the Photos page on your blog. If anyone is seeing very slow loads, email me your site URL to help@micro.blog and I may be able to optimize it sooner rather than waiting for Micro.blog to catch up.