Accurately testing speed performance asset combining plugin [Vanilla 2021.009]

Caylus

Hiya,

So I've tried writing a plugin that combines, minifies and compresses JS and CSS files used by Vanilla.

(Basically the same idea as https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/consolidate-plugin)

It reduces the number of seperate requests quite a bit, as well as cutting the bandwith by gzipping minified files. Theoretically this should increase page speed.

However, it introduces some overhead - although I've tried my best to keep it at a minimum. This obviously decreases page speed.

Anyone an idea how to test which factor 'wins' out in the end? I don't have an active forum to test it on, but if the effect is negligable then the plugin has no point, and I'd rather not add it to the addon library in that case.

(for those interested, the test version is available on github https://github.com/TMSSassen/AssetCompressor)

Bleistivt

I recommend testing with Googles PageSpeed or Lighthouse tools (with both the plugin turned on and off).

Vanilla adds a lot of the legacy script dynamically though, so naive asset bundling will result in many different bundles a user has to download when visiting different site sections, which may result in larger bandwidth usage overall. I would also look into enabling HTTP2 (and multiplexing) for the webserver which could make bundling unnecessary.