What is going on with Ashes wiki?

Pham

I don't know if anyone else has noticed but recently it seems like it is taking forever to load pages on the ashes wiki. Does anyone know what's happening or why that's occurring?

GrandSerpent

I just had a look at this in the browser dev tools, and it looks like something deeply weird is going on. The server seems to be responding to requests to load most pages in a reasonable amount of time (1-2 seconds), but a few specific pages (e.g. Combat) are hanging for almost a minute.

I don't know the details of how this specific wiki software is implemented, but my guess would be that there's something computationally intensive going on when the server is generating the HTML for longer pages (e.g. Nodes, Combat).

It also looks like content-heavy pages are loading a significant number of resources concurrently (mostly video clips). Scrolling down the Combat page results in 240 MB of data (that's a quarter of a gigabyte!) being transferred. Most requests also seem to be cache misses, meaning this data is being served from the origin, rather than Cloudflare, which might be slowing the server down even more. Maybe the Cloudflare cache was cleared recently?

Ideally content like images would be lazy-loaded, and ideally video files shouldn't be loaded at all until a user has clicked on a thumbnail. Just tossing a loading="lazy" attribute on the img tags would probably help quite a bit.