Does My Front Page Take Too Long to Load?

A reader complains that my front page takes too long to load, on one of his machines, as long as five minutes.  That must be one Jurassic machine running some superannuated browser.  I am wondering if others are experiencing similar difficulties.  A while back I made some additions, including a Facebook button, and I am wondering if these add-ons are slowing things down.  The Facebook button, though, is a nifty utility: when conditions are right, the thing 'goes viral'  and I get an avalanche of page views.

I am open for comments regarding technical aspects of this site.  If, on the other hand, you have a beef about the content of these pages, then I invite you to fill out the following:

Comments

[Martin]

Ja, it loads slow for me too. Not super slow, but it's definitely noticeable. Noticeable enough for me to have to hit the "stop" button every time I load your blog. Too many posts on the front page, perhaps, it seems?

[John]

As you say, the reader's machine must be Jurassic. Perhaps even Triassic. I have no difficulty loading or viewing the blog. At most, it takes an extra second or two for the introductory post that explains the blog's title and so on to load.

[Kevin Kim]

With a 2009 Mac using the latest version of the Firefox browser:

Clicking directly to this page = page loads in under 3 seconds.

Clicking directly onto your main page = loads in under 12 seconds.

[Fritz]

FYI. Almost instant loading with Windows 7 and Firefox 12.0. I say "almost" because it couldn't have been instant, but it was so fast that it seemed instant.

[Bill Vallicella]

Good point, Martin. I could reduce the number of posts displayed on the front page.

Thanks, John.

Good to hear from you, Kevin. Do you consider 12 seconds slow?

[JHall]

Hi Bill,

Your page comes up pretty much instantaneously for myself - then again, I'm on FiOS.

[Dead Hand]

It does not load very slow for me, but it will definitely be an improvement to limit the number of post on the front page to 10-15, because there are a lot of DOM elements being loaded.

Oh, and it might be useful to someone to know that an extremely lightweight (mobile) version of the site is available at this address: http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/.m/

[WLW]

On IE 9, it is 10 second load time.

[Bill Vallicella]

Thanks, gentlemen.

Wow, a mobile version of the site. This old man is learning a lot from you young guys.

[Kevin Kim]

Dr. V,

re: 12 seconds

Your site appears almost instantaneously when I click to get on the main page, but the little "frills" on the page take a few seconds to load. If I try scrolling up or down before all that loading is complete, the scrolling motion is a bit jerky. But that resolves itself quickly enough, and I'm not in any rush.

Ultimately, yes, twelve seconds is a mite slow, but my computer's also a mite old by 2012 standards, so the problem isn't your site. Everyone's got terabyte-scale memory and quad-core processors these days (or are we hex-core now?)... I'm holding out for quantum computing, whenever that's gonna happen.

[Brent]

I suspect it may have something to do with a work based proxy.

Your website takes forever to load for me at work. I have a brand new computer and a fast pipe. I often have to hit stop and refresh just to get the page to load. Any more I just open it and forget about it until later when I have a break.

I think that the work proxy is blocking certain parts of the webposts, making it take a long time to load in IE. IE seems to hang up when the whole page can not be loaded at once. I didn't have the problem a while ago. I do know that a lot of social networking stuff is blocked at work.

At home on my (over) ten year old computer on a much slower connection using firefox as a browser it is much faster.

[Bill Vallicella]

Brent,

Thanks. The guy who complained was having trouble at work in a gov't office in a foreign land.

[Bill Vallicella]

I just changed the number of posts that appear on the front page from 30 to 20. Let's see what that does.