Profiles Need Some Serious Help!

@shawn @katylava @harrison

All of the new features you guys have implemented are really great, I’m a big fan, but they’ve exacerbated an already painful issue with regards to load time of profiles. I did some analysis on my end and my profile, for example, took almost 3 minutes to complete the page load.

Why? Image requests. Loads of image requests. Because the profiles record the post content for every post and like even stuff I didn’t post is loading in the images contained in that post. Couple that with the fact that it is loading in at once every single post I’ve interacted with (be it via liking or posting) in the last thirty days and you’ve got a giant mess on your hands.

Suggestions for repair:

1. Utilize the same sort of AJAX requests you use when loading additional forum posts upon scrolling to the bottom (Assumed AJAX, too lazy to double check) to paginate profile page content, perhaps loading ~50 items at a time.
2. Parse out images in profiles to utilize a placeholder image. Perhaps do some clever javascript to let people reveal the actual image without having to browse away. This would cut potentially hundreds of requests to a single one on the initial page load making the profiles much more manageable.

As I’ve said before, huge fan of the work you guys are doing, it’s just gotten to the point where it’s plain impossible to load a profile in a reasonable amount of time.