Gophersmug (5 Aug 2020) 
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Take heart, Gophers, there's trouble on the other side
of the fence!!!

Let's start with a:

Questionnaire 
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1. When you're browsing Gopher, are you seeing page load
times of FIVE to SEVEN SECONDS?

2. Are you seeing page weights of TWO THOUSAND KILOBYTES?
(If you are, somebody's phlogging 'War and Peace', Baby.)

3. Are you seeing FIVE HUNDRED PLUS Javascript dependencies?

4. Do you ever see, when you get to the bottom of a gopher
page, an  advertisement announcing, "IT'S LIKE A PRESSURE
WASH FOR YOUR INSIDES!!!"

5. Are you in the mood to indulge yourself with a little
Schadenfreude???

If your answers are No, No, No, Never, and You Betcha,
read on!

Discussion 
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Coming in at Number 5 on Hacker News yesterday morning
was the story, "In spite of an increase in Internet speed,
webpage speeds have not improved over time."

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-need-for-speed/

(HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24050980)

According to the story and underlying source, it takes
five to seven seconds for a page to load.

Why would this be the case?

I wondered, when I read this, how big are (http) web pages
these days? According to HttpArchive, the average size
of a web page, that is, "The sum of transfer size kilobytes
of all resources requested by the page", is about 2000
kilobytes.

https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight

Another thing impacting on web page load speeds, suggested
in the HN discussion, is All That Javascript.  Consider,
for example, this comment by HNer superkuh:

"This makes them large in MB but that's not the true
cause of the problem. The true cause is all the external
calls for loading JS from other sites and then the time
to attempt to execute that and build the actual webpage."

Feel smug today, Gophers.

And always remember our motto -- "We dig it!!!"