We had an interesting discussion a few days ago about how slow DK has become for some users.
The problem seems to be the 3rd party bloatware that comes along with the amazing content that brings us all here. The Facebook and Twitter widgets are the main culprits.
It seems that these doodads are constantly loading and drag performance down. Since I have no use for Twitter at all, and prefer to share DK stories the old-fashioned way by simply cutting and pasting the url into Facebook, the trade off in site usability was unacceptable.
It's not my equipment or connection.
Speedtest = 50+ Mbps
6 GB of RAM
Some folks had great suggestions on how to alleviate the problem, so I thought I would pass them along.
1. If you are not using the FB and Twitter widgets that appear at the top of each diary, you can use an app like "Ghostery" to prevent them from loading each time. It is free.
There are others, so Google around to find one you like. They also give you the option of turning off all trackers, which protects your privacy and may also boost performance.
2. The best tip in the previous diary was from Bill in Detroit.
Bill suggested modifying the HOSTS file in Windows to block 3rd party sites BEFORE they get to your browser. While this doesn't help with the FB/Twitter issue, it definitely made my machine a lot faster. As a bonus, this is a two-way-street that prevents malware from sending data out of your machine as well.
You can learn more about this here...
Blocking Unwanted Connections with a Hosts File
It is also free and not that difficult to do.
3. Another tweak from serendipityisabitch proved to enhance performance and is very simple to implement from your DK profile page.
There is a Profile setting that lets you specify how many front page articles you want the page to load. The default is something like 15 or 18, and it makes a tremendous difference if you cut the number down. Currently I'm at 8, and the lag is pretty short.
I hope I'm not pissing off the DK administrators, and perhaps they may want to weigh in here, but the site performance due to this bloat was causing me to avoid participation here.
Since I implemented the above tweaks, my machine is humming along like...uh, a well-oiled machine.