Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27080627-20161013174107/@comment-24473195-20161022100444

Fandyllic wrote: It will be an extremely long time before I ever consider the Visual Editor for my primary editor. It's too damn slow! That makes any other possible advantages mostly irrelevant. Well, that's mostly true. It is very slow on huge pages with many templates, links or references and images. The thing is that it essentially reloads part of the page (adding more html) and requests all its libraries, while the wikitext editor just requests the wikitext to dump into a text box.

One approach they might consider to improve its speed is to load all the libraries whenever an individual page is loaded for reading, and cache that. Another approach might be to lazy load the images because even if they are never seen they still affect performance, for example, a bunch of animated gifs.

On a side note, disabling images, cache and loading Death_Knight takes about ~ 18 seconds using VE, and about ~8 seconds using the rich text editor (VE & RE ~ 10 secs with caching). That page seems to be loading a good amount of extra content for popups which amounts to about ~ 1MB on full page load.

I think the performance is reasonable for casual editing on a new wiki or a simple page, it certainly beats having to preview a page dozens of times.