I see we have a new skin …

[jrrdw]

@mrfoo

Naaaa, just personal preference.

@sb15

"Dunning-Kruger" Look in the mirror, tell us. What do you see?

[SpudBlaster15]

Look in the mirror, tell us. What do you see?

Someone who possesses at least the very minimal level of computer knowledge required to understand that OP's choice of OS has little or no bearing on the massive performance penalty imposed by this site's header.

Tell us jrrdw, which specific characteristics of Windows 10 do you think would help his 2011 hardware use fewer resources than with MacOS or Windows 8.1 while rendering the canvas element? Come on, I know you've got this. You've always had such a deep technical understanding of the topics on which you opine. This should be trivial for a man of your obvious intellect.

[jackssmirkingrevenge]

I have 8!

Notifications? It doesn't seem to correspond to anything.

[PCGUY]

Wow guys, there will be no more attacks like this from either side. I don't care what kind of computer you use - I'll do my best to ensure SpudFiles can operate for you somehow. A 9 year old Toshiba laptop running macOS I can certainly see struggling greatly across many webpages, not just SpudFiles. It isn't about the OS choice, but that combination does introduce several other factors at play for webpage slowdowns.

Ironically enough the purpose of this design is to be extremely light weight, it is the entire purpose of this theme in fact - super light weight with JS/CSS running most heavy lifting. Even on a 4 year old cell phone, the header animation is extremely fast for me. However I am quite curious and have disabled the animation for now, does it feel any different for those reporting slowdowns? The older Toshiba I understand... but I am at a loss with claims of using 10% CPU on the header alone on any modern device. The header animation can be found here if you want to test it out alone - https://vincentgarreau.com/particles.js/

Regarding the comments about Google ads, block as you see fit - but please understand this is not just SpudFiles but how the entire Internet is. You won't find an ad network that doesn't attempt to do some level of tracking, and you quite literally cannot avoid it if you touch the Internet. I choose these from Google because I know you will never be bombarded by wild animated ads or other nonsense and I can block unsavory content. I also have purposely chosen to NOT warn/prompt on individuals performing ad blocking, because I fully understand why people make the choice. At the end of the day however, I need to try to at least break even on hosting costs for keeping the hobby online for now 16 years. SpudFiles is still shockingly popular, however more lurkers than active individuals.

Also for anyone wondering about the notifications, those are for activity that appears in the upper/right corner. You'll get a browser tab counter of notifications as well.

EDIT - just realized that the header was set to both move when scrolling AND animate. That may explain some of this. It probably shouldn't be doing both, but I'll leave both off for the moment for any feedback.

[SpudBlaster15]

Ironically enough the purpose of this design is to be extremely light weight, it is the entire purpose of this theme in fact - super light weight with JS/CSS running most heavy lifting.

The rest of the site seems to be lightweight and impressively fast. Only issue for me has been the header animation.

Does it feel any different for those reporting slowdowns?

Yep. The site now uses a normal amount of resources on my end.

The header animation can be found here if you want to test it out alone - https://vincentgarreau.com/particles.js/

cpuuse.png (8.38 KiB) Viewed 20750 times

Screenshot of CPU use after loading the page in an unmodified firefox profile on a machine with a quad core Haswell generation CPU. It's debatable whether this can be considered modern, but even medium bitrate 1080p video playback without hardware decoding uses less than half of the resources. I have tested in now on 3 different machines with 2nd, 4th and 6th gen Intel processors and all show abnormally high CPU use. Might try it on a friend's new Ryzen desktop over the weekend to see if the pattern replicates there.

Guess I should try it on my phone too - didn't think of that because I rarely use it for web browsing.

Regarding the comments about Google ads, block as you see fit - but please understand this is not just SpudFiles but how the entire Internet is. You won't find an ad network that doesn't attempt to do some level of tracking, and you quite literally cannot avoid it if you touch the Internet.

Yeah, I acknowledge that and am mostly lamenting how we let the internet ecosystem develop this way. The fact that it has become so challenging to use the web at all without being tracked is very disappointing to me, but I totally understand your personal decisions with respect to advertising on Spudfiles.

[jrrdw]

Oh lord, nuff said...

Really? You're really still clinging to that "my platform is better than your platform" bullshit? Grow up, man.

I see now where things turned sour, I thought you was being sarcastic when you said you where using a "Hackintoshed". Which is why I replied as I did, I wasn't trying to pick on you and I hope you realize that now. I myself have never heard of people doing this for their OS. I've used duel boot systems before but never a Mac.

[jrrdw]

Look in the mirror, tell us. What do you see?

Someone who possesses at least the very minimal level of computer knowledge required to understand that OP's choice of OS has little or no bearing on the massive performance penalty imposed by this site's header.

Tell us jrrdw, which specific characteristics of Windows 10 do you think would help his 2011 hardware use fewer resources than with MacOS or Windows 8.1 while rendering the canvas element? Come on, I know you've got this. You've always had such a deep technical understanding of the topics on which you opine. This should be trivial for a man of your obvious intellect.

I would suggest turning off / stopping any programs running in the back ground such as any photo editing programs, music players, monitoring programs. By themselves don't use a lot of resources but all added together can cause lag, if he was using Windows based OS.

[mrfoo]

I don't care what kind of computer you use - I'll do my best to ensure SpudFiles can operate for you somehow.

Thanks :)

A 9 year old Toshiba laptop running macOS I can certainly see struggling greatly across many webpages, not just SpudFiles. It isn't about the OS choice, but that combination does introduce several other factors at play for webpage slowdowns.

You'd be surprised how well it does. This is literally the first time a simple webpage has managed to grind the machine*, despite its age, without it being caused by accidentally trying to play 4k video on its 720p screen. It's interesting, because I've never had an issue with canvas-based stuff before, including some of my own stuff which is /properly/ heavy on particles.

Performance-wise, the rest of the site goes like shit off a stick. I'm guessing the phpBB guys have done quite a lot of work with improving cache and back end performance.

* IBM / Lenovo, not <shudder> Toshiba. Yeah, my platform is better than your platform :)

[mrfoo]

So, to follow up on my previous "nitpicking". Here's screenshot of the "latest posts" display of a french-language machinists forum I'm on, with the screen shrunk down to about the 700px horizontal space the content gets here

And the latest posts here.

On both forums I can see the thread title, location, age, original poster, number of views and posts, and whether there are new posts for me. At least I assume I can see the latter here, thats what the big green tick means, right?

On the other forum, however, I can also see the time of the last post, and who it was posted by, thus making the latest posts bit pretty much useless - all I can do is read *every* post, and go by "is there a tick or not". And as the index page section list has gone all imagey and lost all context beyond a "new posts" "badge" (that's what they're called, right?) that tries to hide itself in the image...

The "last poster / when" information is available here if I go to each individual section index, but font choice, size, and lack of horizontal space makes stuff look like this, losing even more valuable *vertical* space :

Screen Shot 2020-01-10 at 16.20.22.png (28.02 KiB) Viewed 20677 times

[PCGUY]

mrfoo,

I'm honestly not entirely sure how you saw a limited version of the Recent Topics box that appears on the main homepage. I see you PMed me regarding the change as well. As of today we did just move servers (some of you may have noticed the forum unavailable for several hours this morning in the US). Perhaps it was related? As long as it keeps showing you the correct stuff consistently now, that's what matters.

FYI I am communicating with the style designer for the current default style on SpudFiles. I believe I can bring the animation back to the main header with lower noticeable CPU use, along with several other additional performance and caching enhancements. There are a few visual things I want to tweak (we shouldn't see individual ranks in plain text AND image, attachment images are sometimes aligned right for some reason, I may identify new forum images for a couple in need for the home page, etc) and I need to bring the SpudWiki back online. Expect to see small tweaks as we move through January.

and yes, an optional white/light colored theme that you can set while logged in will be added. It will also be a modern/mobile friendly design with the intent of staying light weight and easy to use across devices.

[bravootome]

If the site is ready ...... I bearly manged to replay to a post.... A random post....