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Performance

Best Practices

Realtime Components

When writing code for realtime features we have to keep a couple of things in mind:

  1. Do not overload the server with requests.
  2. It should feel realtime.

Thus, we must strike a balance between sending requests and the feeling of realtime. Use the following rules when creating realtime solutions.

  1. The server will tell you how much to poll by sending Poll-Interval in the header. Use that as your polling interval. This way it is easy for system administrators to change the polling rate. A Poll-Interval: -1 means you should disable polling, and this must be implemented.
  2. A response with HTTP status 4XX or 5XX should disable polling as well.
  3. Use a common library for polling.
  4. Poll on active tabs only. Please use Visibility.
  5. Use regular polling intervals, do not use backoff polling, or jitter, as the interval will be controlled by the server.
  6. The backend code will most likely be using etags. You do not and should not check for status 304 Not Modified. The browser will transform it for you.

Reducing Asset Footprint

Page-specific JavaScript

Certain pages may require the use of a third party library, such as d3 for the User Activity Calendar and Chart.js for the Graphs pages. These libraries increase the page size significantly, and impact load times due to bandwidth bottlenecks and the browser needing to parse more JavaScript.

In cases where libraries are only used on a few specific pages, we use "page-specific JavaScript" to prevent the main main.js file from becoming unnecessarily large.

Steps to split page-specific JavaScript from the main main.js:

  1. Create a directory for the specific page(s), e.g. graphs/.
  2. In that directory, create a namespace_bundle.js file, e.g. graphs_bundle.js.
  3. Add the new "bundle" file to the list of entry files in config/webpack.config.js.
    • For example: graphs: './graphs/graphs_bundle.js',.
  4. Move code reliant on these libraries into the graphs directory.
  5. In graphs_bundle.js add CommonJS require('./path_to_some_component.js'); statements to load any other files in this directory. Make sure to use relative urls.
  6. In the relevant views, add the scripts to the page with the following:
- content_for :page_specific_javascripts do
  = page_specific_javascript_bundle_tag('lib_chart')
  = page_specific_javascript_bundle_tag('graphs')

The above loads chart.js and graphs_bundle.js for this page only. chart.js is separated from the bundle file so it can be cached separately from the bundle and reused for other pages that also rely on the library. For an example, see this Haml file.

Code Splitting

TODO flesh out this section once webpack is ready for code-splitting

Minimizing page size

A smaller page size means the page loads faster (especially important on mobile and poor connections), the page is parsed more quickly by the browser, and less data is used for users with capped data plans.

General tips:

  • Don't add new fonts.
  • Prefer font formats with better compression, e.g. WOFF2 is better than WOFF, which is better than TTF.
  • Compress and minify assets wherever possible (For CSS/JS, Sprockets and webpack do this for us).
  • If some functionality can reasonably be achieved without adding extra libraries, avoid them.
  • Use page-specific JavaScript as described above to dynamically load libraries that are only needed on certain pages.

Additional Resources