Took some time the other day to try out some tests for improving frontend performance. Since the page never truly reloads, it offers the ability for some cool opportunities with caching data.
So, here's some of the stuff I got so far!
Game pages load in quite a bit of data. I figure that many times you're actually getting to the game page by clicking from a listing page, or home page, or recommended game, etc.
Since we have information for the game on that previous page (game title, developer, etc.) I have enough information to "bootstrap" the page before even making a single request to the server for more data.
So, I've actually pushed this out! It now immediately shows game pages with the data it has, then it lazy loads the rest of the data into view. Check it out!
The other bit of perf "magic" I've done is fast backs. So, I store the data required to render pages that are in your browsing history. Then when you press the back button, it reloads that page from that cached data and never hits the server. This way it's an almost immediate back. I have only pushed this out for homepage, game listings, and forums.
Let me know if you feel any perceived speed up, and if it causes any issues for you! It took a bit of work to hack up everything and get it working.
If it goes well I can extend this to other parts of the site, like user profiles, news articles, and even forum topics.
