掲示板 Forums - Long loading times / too many loading screens

Now, this is somewhat related to my VPN (i live in russia and renshuu doesn't work without VPN unfortunately). Specifically, my VPN is very lossy: about 10-20% of all packets disappear. That is despite the bandwidth being in MB/s and around 300ms of ping. Combined, this causes initial connections to become very slow, as the system sends a request and then does longer and longer waits for repeats, which never arrive. Most of the time the wait is only a split second, but sometimes it won't load for minutes unless i entirely reopen the app.

Basically, I want more aggressive caching behaviour: instead of loading each question of a quiz only after a previous one answered - pre-load a chunk of questions ahead of time (both correct and all possible bad answers, excluding pictures; although even only preloading correct results and requesting from server on mistakes would make quizzing quite a bit smoother), then, in case of mistakes, load new ones asynchronously and shuffle locally. A more aggressive retry behaviour would be nice, but i imagine it is tied to client's TCP settings and may be impossible to modify.

Would that be possible?

Very few things are impossible, but what you're asking for is *extremely* difficult for the benefits that it will provide.

There's two main factors here:

1. renshuu is free, and so I cannot afford to make and maintain (both cost and the time/expertise to keep them all running) multiple servers around the world - everything has to eventually get to renshuu's servers in the US.

2. Also, because renshuu is free, 99% of the code is shared across the website and the two (iOS and Android) apps. Caching across those different architectures is complex, troublesome, and requires an additional layer of eventual maintenance that I simply am not capable of doing with regards to my time restrictions.

renshuu's code-base is literally 20+ years old - all of the generation of html, db lookups, business logic - it's all done on the server. Separating that all out and handling the UI layers locally, for example, is simply not realistic for me.

So, even the most simple levels of caching would require a rebuilding of a lot of the code that lives on the server, and then having to maintain both "versions" (just to pick an example, let's say validating a correct answer, which is quite complex).

It's tempting to say "well, you can just (insert development strategy X)", but I promise you - if I could do it, I would. Any kind of caching/offline support is at the very top of my personal wishlist.

I'd much rather keep renshuu free, keep renshuu (the company, in terms of employees) small, and keep my life as healthy and stress-free as possible, so some things simply aren't going to happen.