UI Performance Improvements

[TheJam]

I was looking into the interface as it’s quite slow, on the XR1000, and seen it reported on other routers as well. It seems like the way pages are being loaded are quite inefficient.
 

Looking at the pages in the Settings, all static assets like html pages, JavaScript pages, images, etc., they don’t get cached and keep getting re-downloaded from page-to-page. Nor are they optimised (i.e. minified) - wouldn’t expect noticeable improvement from that alone but doesn’t hurt. Lots of reloading of iframes, from page-to-page, even if the background image stays the same in that iframe, it will display it as a blank white page for a sec, re-downloads all those assets and displays them again to show the same background and form fields. Seems like a lot of expensive queries and DOM manipulation which adds up. Is this something Netgear controls or is it part of DumaOS? 
 

Feels like there could be a lot of quick wins for performance gains from the UI with just caching alone for pages which aren’t dynamic. Does feel like it would really benefit from a bit of an overhaul though like being built with a framework like React where it’s only updating the DOM where necessary or deployed as a PWA. Maybe there’s limitations I’m not aware of though for this. 
 

I worked as a performance engineer for 4 years and now work as a front-end engineer so just wanted to give some feedback/ suggestions as it seems like a common complaint. 

[Netduma Fraser]

The XR1000 is the slowest interface of them all, I think this may be due to the addition of Armor, disabling this, clearing browser cache/cookies and then reloading each page once should speed it up. Also ensuring a connection to the interface using HTTP over HTTPS. Thanks for the suggestions, I will pass them onto the team to have a look at, it's not something I'd feel comfortable commenting on.

[TheJam]

18 minutes ago, Netduma Fraser said:

The XR1000 is the slowest interface of them all, I think this may be due to the addition of Armor, disabling this, clearing browser cache/cookies and then reloading each page once should speed it up. Also ensuring a connection to the interface using HTTP over HTTPS. Thanks for the suggestions, I will pass them onto the team to have a look at, it's not something I'd feel comfortable commenting on.

No worries, totally understandable. I've raised a lot of posts asking for help but not spent any time offering help or feedback so just want to pay back the hard work you guys do in the forums to help people - you've helped myself on many occasions and continue to do so. If you guys need any help, I'd be happy to do a deeper dive and provide a list of potential improvements and suggestions in terms of optimising the interface/ web app. 

Thanks for the tips, I'll go try that out as well with the interface and see if it helps. I find Chrome is much quicker than Safari using it which has helped a lot but some of the rapps can still take awhile.

Also, happy to contribute in any way possible - would be happy even exporting the existing logic you have in the assets and adapt everything into a React/ PWA project if you wanted to see a proof of concept of what it could be like. 

[Netduma Fraser]

That's very kind of you thank you, we do appreciate it! I think for the moment, we're so deep in the next iteration of DumaOS that it would be better to try that once available and see what may have been improved upon/rectified and then what may still need improving and then we'll be in a better spot to implement those changes.

That makes sense, Safari forces HTTPS by default and I'm not sure if there is a way to disable it. Regarding PWA we were looking at doing something like this, I'm not sure if it's still planned though.

[TheJam]

Ah nice one, looking forward to the updates - thanks very much for the transparency!