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Environmental Impact

Understanding website weight​

The amount of bandwidth the platform uses depends on 2 main factors:

  1. Have you visited it before?
  2. Have you visited it recently?

The bandwidth transfer consists of

  • Core platform
  • Database sync
  • Rendered content

Tools in place to reduce bandwidth

  • locally cached database (only syncs with server when new info available)
  • server-compressed images (resizes all images to have max 1200px width ~ 50kb)
  • core platform pre-cache via service worker (only downloaded on new release ~ monthly)
  • on-the-fly image caching via service worker (all images cached locally, purged yearly)

As a worst-case scenario, a new user visiting the site automatically lands on the howto page and downloads:

- Full platform (for all pages) ~ 1MB
- Full database (for all pages) ~ 1KB
- Full list of rendered howtos ~ 9MB
  Total ~ 10MB

Example first visit page weight

Whilst browsing the site the user will download the following:

- Profile content on demand (images cached on the fly)
- Howto rendered content on first open  (cached on the fly)
- Map tiles on first open (cached on the fly)
- Academy pages on every open (not cached, is an iframe)
Total ~1MB

Page weight on revisit

Returning to the site some days/weeks later the user will download:

- Core platform updates (released monthly, full 1MB again)
- New howtos
- New content for pages visited (if not previously visited)
Total ~2MB

Monitoring webpage weight​

The easiest way to do this is open devtools (F12) and swap to the network tab. As you browse you will see the number of MBs transferred. Do not confuse this with the resources size, as that includes cached resources also.

Plans to reduce​

There are various issues and places this has been discussed, the most up-to-date information can likely be found within issues tagged global good
https://github.com/ONEARMY/community-platform/labels/Global%20Good%20%F0%9F%8C%8D

Legacy Docs​

Most of this is covered in the 'Big Corporations' discussion, however a few points for the site we are building are:

  1. We want to be advanced in terms of lessening the environmental impact of the platform we produce.

  2. Many of the biggest wins don't come from intense optimisation, but limiting replication/duplication and the constant redownload of the same files

  3. We have image compression in place for all uploaded images, and a service worker to cache both core platform and content

loading the core platform along with docs page, including all current tutorials and cover images has a total of 12.5kb image

This discussion took place on slack v4-website-dev on January 17th 2019