Forum:SH:Page size

This post is pretty long, so here's a summary: "Some of our articles are too long, and their lengths are slowing down render times and slowing down page load times for mobile users. They also can't be read in one sitting by people with an average concentration span. To fix this, we should split our long articles into sub-articles."

Now, for the long version. Over the last week or so I've been looking through the templates on this wiki, identifying ones that slow down page render times, and converting them to Lua. Lua is great for speeding up complex templates: for example, the new version of Template:Eras that uses Module:Eras is about ten times as fast as the old one. However, for less complex templates Lua doesn't help very much. There is a slight overhead when switching from PHP to Lua, and this means that for templates which only have one or two parameters, a Lua version may actually be slightly slower. To find the complex templates that would benefit from conversion I've been looking at pages with long render times, like Wedge Antilles and Palpatine, and going through all of the templates transcluded on them to see how complex they are. I've already converted a few, and there are some more that would still benefit from being Lua-fied (e.g. the infobox templates), but most of the templates left over are simple and won't benefit from conversion.

However, the page render times on Wedge Antilles and Palpatine are still very long - both are around the ten-second mark. In retrospect, the reason for this is obvious. The pages are simply too large. The Wedge Antilles page is currently 659 kb, and the Palpatine page is currently 475 kb. Compare this to Wikipedia's advice that articles of more than 50kb should be considered for splitting, and articles of more than 100kb almost certainly should be split. There are a few things we could do to speed up page render times with these large pages, for example getting rid of the small images in citation templates, and altering Template:'s so that it doesn't use span tags. But these kinds of things alter article content, albeit slightly, so users here may be wary of them, and they may only save a small amount of time spent rendering the page. To get big savings on rendering time, we will need to make the pages shorter by using summary style.

Long pages are not only bad for rendering time - they are also bad for mobile users, and users with slow connections. For example, on my old iPhone 4, the Palpatine took about 30 seconds to load completely, including the images. And my phone connection is 3G, so for readers in developing countries who have slower internet than I do, some of our pages may be completely inaccessible because of their size.

Another reason to make a switch to shorter articles is concentration spans of readers. At the moment, a long article like Wedge Antilles would take a long time to read (perhaps a couple of hours). Organising this content into different pages would enable readers to get a good overview of the subject before their concentration spans run out (according to the Wikipedia page I linked above, that's about 40-50 minutes), and they could always click on one of the links to the sub-articles if they wanted to know more.

So, to sum up, I think we need to start going through some of our longer articles, and splitting the content out into shorter articles. For example, we could have a Personality of Palpatine article, a Powers and abilities of Palpatine article, and perhaps a few different articles for periods in his biography, all linked from sections of the main Palpatine article. And then we could cut the main article down in size drastically, without losing any of the content. What do other people think about this? Mr. Stradivarius (talk) 16:53, December 7, 2014 (UTC)