2.0 RC 5 Performance

CyberGene

navindra I'm pretty sure UX performance has taken a slight hit.

It used to be much worse, believe me 😃 spent hours with Claude profiling the performance and opening issues until we reached the current decent performance in RC5.

BTW, if you use FoF Polls and Tirnstile, they both have performance issues that affect the entire forum experience (not only the functionality they provide). I’ve reported these issues but they are still not fixed, so I’m using locally patched versions.

BTW2, I have a custom extension that I’ve created with Claude Fable 5 that does some pretty drastic measures to improve performance (by e.g. allowing CloudFlare to cache guest visits by removing CSRF tokens for non-authenticated users, etc, etc) and PianoClack is very snappy now but I’m not going to publish something that is risky because these fixes are all complex and create other issues that need to be addressed and it’s a cat and mouse game. But if you’re obsessed with squeezing every last millisecond of performance out of your forum, AI can help. Not recommending anything, just sharing my own experience with PianoClack.

navindra

CyberGene It used to be much worse, believe me 😃 spent hours with Claude profiling the performance and opening issues until we reached the current decent performance in RC5.

Thanks indeed for all that hard work! You definitely helped converge 2.0 to a shippable state, in my opinion.

It may be subjective, but I feel like the spinner lingers for a touch longer... this may actually be pending on the backend.

CyberGene BTW, if you use FoF Polls and Tirnstile, they both have performance issues that affect the entire forum experience (not only the functionality they provide). I’ve reported these issues but they are still not fixed, so I’m using locally patched versions.

Thanks for the heads-up. I'm not using Polls yet, but there is demand for it...

CyberGene But if you’re obsessed with squeezing every last millisecond of performance out of your forum, AI can help. Not recommending anything, just sharing my own experience with PianoClack.

Thanks! I'm slowing working on the burndown and that's definitely a good idea.

Subarist

navindra It may be subjective, but I feel like the spinner lingers for a touch longer... this may actually be pending on the backend.

To be honest, the longer spinner transition is one of the main reasons I've lost some motivation to migrate several of my sites to Flarum v2.

Even on Discuss, performing a series of actions in succession gives me the impression that my network connection is slow, even when it isn't.

As we've discussed before, most of the changes in v2 are effectively invisible to the average user. They won't notice the architectural improvements or internal refactoring.

What users will notice is responsiveness. Even a small delay repeated across every interaction makes the forum feel less responsive, and that quickly becomes frustrating. New features are always welcome, but if the interface feels slower, that's the part users remember.

Whether the cause is the frontend, the backend, or simply the spinner itself, from a user's perspective, perception is reality.

Karl

Subarist when I get back home, I'll run every test imaginable using my sandboxes to see what I can do to improve this and document my findings to the GitHub repo.

Subarist

@navindra
Sorry for drifting a little off your original topic.
By the way, great job. I've always felt that pianotell.com is a very well-balanced community with thoughtful content.

@Karl
That would be great.
For people who are new to Flarum, I don't think v2 has any major issues. However, for those of us who have been using Flarum v1 for a long time and interact with it every day, the rhythm of using the forum has changed.
It's difficult to point to a single technical reason, but the overall feeling is that the interface responds a little more slowly than before. Each individual delay is small, yet when it happens after almost every action, it becomes noticeable and subtly changes the experience.

mafesa

CyberGene BTW, if you use FoF Polls and Turnstile, they both have performance issues that affect the entire forum experience

Unfortunately, I can confirm this (1, 2, 3); the slowdown with Turnstile is noticeable, and many users reported it to me when I enabled the extension.
I solved it by using reCAPTCHA.

I'm also having trouble with this forum, but I think it's just on my end since no one else is reporting it—sometimes it takes a few seconds to open a thread.

navindra

Subarist Sorry for drifting a little off your original topic

Thanks! I actually don’t mind at all but it may be worth splitting the topic out given how important it is on its own.

huseyinfiliz

navindra There's a bug with FoF Categories:
Go to a Forum like https://forum.pianotell.com/t/notes
Click "Start a Discussion" and close it.
Then click the header to go back to the Forum list -- the button still behaves like it is in the previous forum.

I investigated this a bit further and found something interesting.

The issue can be reproduced with a clean Flarum 2.x installation using both Tags and FoF Categories, with the Categories page configured as the homepage.

Steps:

Go to /t/general.
Return to /categories. (homepage)
Click Start a Discussion.

The composer still preselects the previously visited tag.

While debugging, I noticed that on the /categories route:

app.current.get('routeName') // "categories"
app.currentTag()             // returns the previously visited tag model

So the current route is correctly categories, but app.currentTag() still returns the previous tag instead of null.

Looking at the code, it seems app.currentTag() caches the active tag and is normally refreshed on IndexPage via app.currentTag(true). Since FoF Categories uses its own CategoriesPage instead of IndexPage, that refresh doesn't appear to happen.

@IanM I was initially thinking this might need a change in FoF Categories, but since app.currentTag() returns the previous tag even when the current route is categories, would it make more sense to handle this in the Tags extension instead? That way other extensions using app.currentTag() wouldn't need to account for this individually.

IanM

huseyinfiliz thanks for the diagnosis, and yes I agree this is something to put right in flarum/tags itself.

I've opened an issue flarum/framework4859 and will make a start on this shortly

Subarist

IanM
Thank you for all your hard work.

Regarding the loading time of discussion pages in v2, there is still a noticeable difference compared with v1.

https://flarum.es/
https://www.flarum.it/

These officially recognized Flarum communities that are still running v1 have a discussion loading spinner that still feels lightning fast. Although the loading time can fluctuate more, it still has the familiar Flarum experience and rhythm that many of us are used to.

I appreciate all the improvements being made in v2, and I hope the remaining performance gaps can continue to be addressed.

IanM

Subarist of course we will continue to refine and improve core, it's bundled extensions, and the FoF extensions. Some candidates for improvement are already underway.

The bigger part of the puzzle however, are 3rd party extensions. With the new architecture in 2.x, slowdowns can and do happen much easier than they used to. I've already identified multiple examples of this, but please understand it is down to 3rd party extension authors to optimise their code going forward.

Regarding the "rhythm" of Flarum - this is expected, it's a new major version using different underlying architecture and techniques. If it had the same as 1.x, then I'd be worried.

We will always look at reports of slowdowns, etc, but we need details (extensions installed, relevant settings, server config and so on), a "it's slower" or "it's different" does not help us to improve.

One last point, although the communities are recognised by the Flarum Foundation, please remember that in no way are they under our control or influence. We don't have any visibility on their configuration, settings or similar.

Subarist

IanM
I completely agree, and please forgive me if my previous description was a little too subjective.

A clean v2 core itself does not feel slow. From my experience, the performance impact becomes more noticeable after adding extensions.

However, extensions are also an essential part of Flarum's design philosophy, and that is one of the strengths of the platform. Once several extensions are installed , it becomes increasingly difficult for administrators to identify which component is contributing to the overall performance change.

I fully understand that this is a more complex area, and I appreciate the effort from you and the team in improving the core architecture while keeping the extension ecosystem flexible. 😉