New Authentic theme is very very (almost unusably) slow compared to the old theme

Home page of Virtualmin:

New Authentic template Virtualmin home page: 22 requests, 4,458 KB, 11.52 seconds Old template: 25 requests, 95 KB, 7.05 seconds

For most pages it gets dramatic: E.g.:

Backup virtual servers page: New: 12.56 s, 3,951 KB, 14 requests Old: 0.63 s, 44 KB, 4 requests

As it makes it almost unusable, reporting it as a bug.

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Comments

Howdy -- sorry to hear that you're seeing such a performance issue with the new theme!

Are you primarily seeing this issue from one desktop? Or is that occurring across multiple desktops?

Also, which browser/version are you using?

And last question, which Authentic version do you have installed?

We use it ourselves in production for managing various aspects of our business... and for us -- while some pages are perhaps slightly slower than the old theme, I wouldn't label the speed difference we see as significant, especially in more recent versions.

Also, Ilia is working on some major speed improvements for the upcoming 18.00 release.

I'll do some additional testing though with the answers you share above to see if there are any additional improvements we can make.

My config:

  • From Firefox Linux (latest version) browser on a 5 years young laptop
  • Webmin version 1.795
  • Virtualmin version 5.03
  • Theme version Authentic Theme 17.84
  • over a DSL 20/2 Mbits/s link

I tried with a brand-new laptop with Firefox it is slightly better, and with Chrome and Safari even better, but still way not as snappy as the old theme.

The size of transfered data and amount of running javascript is just a huge difference between old and new theme.

Still not usable well mainly for speed reason.

There are other minor reasons:

E.g. bootstrap buttons colors are used in a strange way. Just one example: Buttons that are links to go back to previous pages are blue buttons marked-up as "Primary", while buttons to execute an action are grey ("Default"), e.g. in Backup Server, I regularly press the wrong button to backup and go back to previous page. Going back to previous page should not be buttons (as those are not actions) but links (or smaller buttons at very least, to not be confusing).

Thanks for the additional input, I'll share that with Ilia.

We do know that there is a performance difference between the old theme and the new one, but it shouldn't be as significant as you're describing.

Ilia is making some major changes for 18.00 to improve the speed for that, I'm hoping that will help with what you've described. We'll also review the buttons.

Great, Thanks. Will report here if I see improvements with 18.00.

one thing that can be done to reduce the size of the JS blobs is start utilizing compression on the output of webmin/virtualmin.

Can't use compression on https for PCI-DSS compliance (and not recommended for security too, unfortunately).

And compression won't help on compressed fonts and images, and not that much on minified CSS and JS...

Here more information about the delays in loading: package.min.js is over 1 Megabyte! and package.min.css is over 0.5 Megabytes, and authentic.min.js 0.35 Megabytes, so almost a Megabyte of minified CSS (taking almost 1900 ms to receive) and over 1 Megabyte of Javascript (taking over 2200 ms just to receive it), compared to 18 kilobytes of html, it's easy to see the issue: Large files are already taking 4 seconds receiving time before even starting. Also as there is an iframe, they are received twice! so 8 seconds just to load 4 MB of auxiliary files. Plus, at each page load, they have to be re-interpreted twice.

Just launch Firefox, right-click inspect element, then go to network, reload page, and you will see all the requests and timings. It's killing if you don't have a 2016-high-end computer with a 100 Mbits/s fiber.

Then you can take a look at the "Performance" tab, and see, that once all is loaded, numerous recalculations and repaintings take place, all of which make it non-snappy at all.

A fast, snappy single-paint interface is key to usability. Here the interface is way slower than the server's tasks.

Also, yet another annoyance: When I mass-upgrade scripts, in old template, the progression is displayed. In new tempate there is nothing happening, and then sudden once-at-all the upgrade-results are displayed.

I have 50 megabit cable...yes it is huge but it loads fine on my desktop...:) Firefox is NOT able to utilize today's multi-core processors so that's part of hte issue. I open this on my surface under chrome and yes you can tell the excessively large data payload this theme carries...:)