KT Walrus

I hate that so many search results these days point to AI generated content. The pages on the internet should all be human generated unless the domain uses the .ai TLD. Please don’t be tempted to integrate AI content into Invision Community. As a user, I want to read human generated content on the web. If I want an approximate answer, I will use an AI agent. Nothing would be worse than visiting a forum and later finding out that it is simply a bunch of AI agents discussing amongst themselves. What a waste of time reading content like this.

@Marc Maybe specific to iOS. Happens all the time for me using an iPhone 16 Pro Max. I’m also using the preview site. https://preview.invisionalpha5.com/topic/268-test-tenor-gifs/#comment-1101

No. I haven’t coded my Invision app yet as I’m waiting for IC5 GA. I have contracted with Tighten to develop a Laravel app for the backend of my new IC5 app though. This should be finished in the next few weeks. The backend will manage the SQLite databases. Each user that visits my site will have the backend generate the SQLite database for just that session. Dynamically generating these SQLite databases are lightning fast and contain only the data the user has permission to see. You can check out this site that uses Laravel and SQLite in the meantime: https://pinkary.com

You could start with SQLite for caching data locally on the server. If settings, compiled theme templates, etc. were stored in SQLite, all those queries that are done on every page load would be lightening fast (even faster than fopen). Because SQLite PDO driver is built into PHP and creating a SQLite database is simply touching a file on the server you don’t really need any admin settings to deploy (you should connect to the database in WAL mode though). You could also use SQLite for the Database or Filesystem Storage Methods for files as a fast, easy to use database (as opposed to the local file system). Backing up SQLite is simply copying the database file (using sqlite3_rsync tool if database is live). Also, SQLite would be a better alternative for sessions than Redis (for installations on a single server) Everything about using SQLite is so easy and so fast. In my Laravel prototype, I was able to eliminate aggregate data about content (like stored in the forums table) to show this data like unread counts, last replier, etc. When you aren’t worried about doing 200 queries per page load, you can really simplify the SQL that you write to get the data for showing to a user and not worry about caching it for subsequent page loads. So, even if you don’t want to support storing everything in SQLite, you could make use SQLite to really eliminate many network round trips to the MySQL instance in the Invision Cloud. I really think you could make a difference that your customers would appreciate especially us self-hosting customers.

I just finished paying one of the top Laravel agencies over $100k to prototype this app in Laravel using SQLite (with me on Zoom pairing with the lead programmer for the last 2 months on exploring all my ideas for SQLite at scale) and I am convinced SQLite will scale quite nicely for a large busy site. I am now hoping to apply the knowledge I gained over the last 5 months to an IC5 app using SQLite. I got tired of waiting for Invision to release IC5 so I spent some money on prototyping my ideas in Laravel. Checkout Turso/LibSQL and also Fly.io for more on making SQLite scale for large busy sites. I prototyped LibSQL but ended up going with standard SQLite (with using the newly released sqlite3_rsync tool for syncing to UI servers instead of LibSQL’s embedded replicas). I believe Invision could absolutely replace MySQL with SQLite for Cloud customers and cut your database expenses to a fraction of what you spend with AWS on MySQL and end up with extremely fast queries as a bonus. SQLite queries execute in nanoseconds while MySQL queries take milliseconds.

Two biggest possible areas for increased performance is to use SQLite instead of MySQL for app data and to use FrankenPHP in worker mode for the webserver. I’m working on a new Invision app that uses both these technologies and so far, things are very fast. With SQLite being an in memory database, this is a game changer for CRUD apps. Only issue for me is that the rest of IC5 still uses MySQL and it will take me a while to move these queries to SQLite, especially the config and theme templates. I plan to do this gradually over time, until my full site uses only SQLite. I don’t use any of the included IC5 apps so it is easier to use SQLite for my app’s data. I’m using the Laravel’s Illuminate/database composer package for querying SQLite databases in my IC5 apps. Maybe Invision should save lots of money and move Invision Cloud installations to use per installation SQLite databases? Since a SQLite database is just a single file, backups and restores are very easy and lightning fast.

That explains it. You aren’t the typical user. Nowadays, most people use a mobile phone as desktop usage is declining very fast. I only use my iPhone or iPad to access this website. I think I’m pretty typical of many users these days. Maybe not most older people though. I’m retired too.

I would think the situation would be the same on any mobile device. How do you resize on your phone?

How do you do this on an iPhone?

I was thinking about Cloudflare not as CDN but as an HTTPS server that really knows how to serve websites most efficiently. HTTP3 connections is only one example. Cloudflare is free to put in front of your site and doesn’t take much setup out of the box. Just flip a DNS switch and Cloudflare just works. If it doesn’t help, just turn it off and use Cloudflare’s DNS. But you can also optimize your site by using some of the many services Cloudflare includes in your account.

Have you looked in your browser’s dev tools to see the timeline of where the delay is coming from? Seems to me it would be related to the number of HTTPS requests and whether the browser is doing most requests in parallel. I always use Cloudflare in front of my servers to optimize page loading. Make sure you are using HTTP3 for your site. https://http3check.net/?host=preview.invisionalpha5.com

Why more images visible in second screenshot? Maybe this has something to do with lazy image loading in the first test results versus the second. Maybe hitting a case of their browser not wanting to download as many images in parallel for the v5 case. Just my initial thoughts on what might be going on… Or is there only one image for both?