Documentation page taking a long time to load

[b-rhodes]

This page takes an extremely long time to load and often fails to load for me. I'm not sure if this is a wider issue but I thought I'd raise it in case it does affect more people.

[DyfanJones]

Hi @b-rhodes sorry about that. You are correct it is taking a long time to load up the documentation.

We are currently using AWS Cloudfront to host a static website from AWS S3. Sadly the site is too big for github pages and keeps failing to build when I attempt to host it there.

I am not a front end developer so I am not 100% sure how to improve the performance of the site. If you or anyone knows how to host large static websites please let me know in this thread.

[b-rhodes]

If you try loading it from an s3 bucket (without CloudFront) does it load faster?
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/HostingWebsiteOnS3Setup.html

[DyfanJones]

For the cran we need to have HTTPS. Directly from S3 only support HTTP. However it is worth checking out

[b-rhodes]

Hmm, that's a good point.
If it's hosted on github pages but using Cloudfront to distribute it, could you try to host on s3 instead and keep using cloudfront for the distribution?
https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/cloudfront-https-requests-s3

[DyfanJones]

Sorry if I didn't explain it correctly. It currently is on S3 and uses Cloudfront to distribute.

I couldn't host it on GitHub due to its size

[DyfanJones]

Here is the current repo for the website build

https://github.com/paws-r/paws-r.github.io

[DyfanJones]

@b-rhodes please try the site now. I have added navigation.prune to the mkdocs yml config. This has reduced the --html files from roughly 3.5Mb to 2.8Mb. Not a huge change however a step in the right direction.

UPDATE:
The latest version of mkdocs has given significant improvement with the file reduction. So from ~3.5Mb to ~200Kb.

[DyfanJones]

From my testing the site is responding a lot better however I would like feed back from users. :)

[DyfanJones]

Due to the improvements in mkdocs, we can host the site on github pages again (https://dyfanjones.github.io/paws-test-site/). I guess we could add this as a back up if the main site goes down.

[b-rhodes]

it's looking way better! Loads super fast by comparison now.

[DyfanJones]

Perfect I will close this now. If this issue comes up again please re-open