Why are the seat finder timetables on Southeastern's website so slooooooooow?

[Bungle73]

Honestly they're slower to show up than a tortoise frozen in ice. I just timed it and it took close to 30 seconds from clicking the link to the info showing up. And if you want another day or direction of travel you have to wait an eternity again! In this 2024 it's unacceptable for a basic retrieval of info from a database to take so long. It's literally the slowest thing on the internet! What gives??

 

[station_road]

Do you mean the things such as this link? (Seat Finder for Table 1, Margate - London). It opens instantly for me, and a change of direction takes about 2 seconds to display. Perhaps your internet connection.

https://timetables.southeasternrailway.co.uk/#/timetables/2699/Table 1

 

[Adam Williams]

There's 28 thousand and 654 DOM nodes in each one of those tables, that's a lot of elements for you browser to render! I suspect the actual data retrieval is not the slow part.

 

[Bungle73]

Do you mean the things such as this link? (Seat Finder for Table 1, Margate - London). It opens instantly for me, and a change of direction takes about 2 seconds to display. Perhaps your internet connection.

https://timetables.southeasternrailway.co.uk/#/timetables/2699/Table 1

I'm on a 132 Mbps connection............

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 20 Aug 2024 ==

There's 28 thousand and 654 DOM nodes in each one of those tables, that's a lot of elements for you browser to render! I suspect the actual data retrieval is not the slow part.

Maybe it needs better programming then............?

 

[Adam Williams]

Maybe it needs better programming then............?

It's not necessarily how I would've done it

 

[talldave]

I'm on a 132 Mbps connection............

That's more or less irrelevant, it's what's at either end that matters. The link above takes around 9s to load on my tablet, 12s on my phone - both on same wi-fi connection.

 

[Bungle73]

That's more or less irrelevant, it's what's at either end that matters. The link above takes around 9s to load on my tablet, 12s on my phone - both on same wi-fi connection.

You've just contradicted yourself......

 

[sh24]

It takes about 2 seconds for me on a 130Mbp connection using Safari on Mac.

 

[TheSmiths82]

I wonder if the OP has a Celeron, 4GB of RAM and a hard drive? I can see how on a spec like that it would take so long to render.

 

[Bungle73]

I wonder if the OP has a Celeron, 4GB of RAM and a hard drive? I can see how on a spec like that it would take so long to render.

3 Ghz Intel Core i7 and 8 gigs as a matter of fact.

My iPad exactly the same

 

[Adam Williams]

I wonder if the OP has a Celeron, 4GB of RAM and a hard drive? I can see how on a spec like that it would take so long to render.

To be fair to OP, browser engine developers recommend no more than 1,500 DOM nodes on the tree. Southeastern are far exceeding that recommendation, multiple times over with this tool. I'm not surprised that browsers don't like it

 

[station_road]

To be fair to OP, browser engine developers recommend no more than 1,500 DOM nodes on the tree. Southeastern are far exceeding that recommendation, multiple times over with this tool. I'm not surprised that browsers don't like it

And yet it still renders fine for me

 

[Bungle73]

I don't know why they have to over-complicate it tbh. If you go on LNER's website, they give the same info much more simply.

 

[Adam Williams]

And yet it still renders fine for me

Both things can be true: a) it's bad practice and b) they can just about get away with it, depending on the underlying hardware, rendering engine in use etc

I would bet £50 that if you run Google's Lighthouse tool, which will analyse page performance, on that site, it will not have very positive things to say about it

 

[renegademaster]

You shouldn't really need an i7 and 16gb of RAM to render a timetable. It's poor , bloated Web design that is unfortunately most websites nowadays

 

[talldave]

You've just contradicted yourself......

Errr no I didn’t, I was highlighting that with my (72Mb/s) connection it's the processing speed of the rendering device that's significant, the speed of the Internet "pipe" has no impact on such small amounts of data. My phone's clunky compared to my tablet, hence the significantly slower rendering.