How I made this blog super fast

When I was making the current version of this blog, there was a lot of discussion on Twitter around improving load times and responsiveness on dynamic websites, complete with lots of demonstrations of instant load times even for things that access the database, like searches. I decided to see what I could pull off with this little site, served from a cheap VPS. I was able to get it to a perfect score on Lighthouse, and indeed, if you click around on the links or use the search box, you will see that things load pretty much instantly.

How ¶

I used a few different technologies and ideas:

1. Go backend. As of today, the entire site is served from a single statically compiled binary that is only 7MB. Even the assets (images, CSS, JavaScript, articles) are embedded directly in the binary.

2. The articles themselves are pre-rendered in the build process, embedded directly in the compiled binary, and are all loaded into memory during boot, where they stay.

   There is no database access for individual articles or searching, everything is accessed directly from memory. I did some tests to make sure this was going to be reasonable, even with a ton of articles, and I found that I could probably write a couple articles a week for the rest of my life without causing any real problems. The storage adapter can be change to use a database if it ever becomes absolutely necessary, and then I can just cache frequently accessed articles.

   At some point I will add a comment system, and while those will be in a database, they will only be loaded on demand when the viewer clicks on the "View Comments" button.

3. When you are navigating around the site, I used HTMX to only change the parts of the page that are different; the header, general layout, and footer do not change.