Site Wide Improvement on Twitter to Enable Pages of Faster Loading Times

Site Wide Improvement on Twitter to Enable Pages of Faster Loading Times

Hi Betty

Twitter has been doing several major infrastructure changes that will optimize the loading page of twitter. One of the major changes is the removing of hashbangs URL. Hashbang is the #! In the URL and Twitter Engineers found out that it will create delays in entering a website like Twitter. They remove the hashbang and moved the rendering to the server which dropped the initial page loading time to 1/5th.

Twitter made changes to the JavaScript architecture using CommonJS modules delivered via AMD. The effect of the change is the time to tweet. Time to tweet is being measured by the amount of time it takes from navigation to viewing the first tweet on the timeline. The metric will give us a good idea on how fast it is. One of the effects also in changing the architecture is that twitter will only load the page we need.

These mentioned changes will not affect your previous settings. The main purpose for the changes is to speed up the user interface and browsing capabilities of Twitter.

It won’t have a direct impact to the other features of Twitter.

Hope you will find this helpful.

Cheers  

Site Wide Improvement on Twitter to Enable Pages of Faster Loading Times

The site-wide improvements that Twitter planned were announced on May 2012. They said they will be doing multiple changes to the site which intends to speed up and optimize the performance. Dan Webb, engineering manager for the web core team, published a post on the official Twitter Engineering Blog which outlines the changes to be made. To improve the overall performance of the site, the first step was to fetch the user interface rendering and logic back to their servers.

In March 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Noah Glass build Twitter and launched it around July 2006. The service acquired rapid worldwide popularity with 100 million plus users where in 2012, posted 340 million tweets a day. In September 2010 when the new Twitter was launched, the improvement was pushed to JavaScript which runs on the user’s browser.

According to Webb, if the function was brought back to the Twitter servers, the result of the initial page load times is a drop of 1/5th of what they once were.