Which is one thing I absolutely hate about Netflix nowadays! I usually "discover" movies to watch on "instant" directly on my Roku. When I want to use their website, it's because I saw a preview for a movie and want to add it to my (dvd) queue (since I already searched and they didn't have it in "instant"). So I type "netflix.com" in my browser, and wait 5-10 seconds before that screen loads and allows me to choose which profile to pick (and it doesn't save it, so each time I come back I have to do the same thing). Once I click a profile, it takes another 5-10 seconds to show me a list of "instant" movies and all the links actually become active. Then I can type my search term in the search box (for example, "Matrix") and faster than I can count, a list of movies pops up, and I notice I am forwarded to "dvd.netflix.com" (which, if I go to manually at the beginning, still takes >10s to load). I'm on a 100mbit connection on a late-model macbook pro and no matter which browser I choose (firefox, chrome) it's the same. Is all the slowness due to the massive amount of client-side javascript that has to be loaded and then processed? I'm not sure, but their web site has been getting slower and slower for years, not faster and definitely not more usable (don't get me started on the fact that they don't show the movie title in text w/out having to hover for 2 seconds -- trying to read the titles on many of the movie image thumbnails is unpleasant).
Streaming performance itself has always been top notch. Hard to understand how I can start a streaming movie in less time than it takes to load a list of movies in a browser.
That's strange indeed, for a couple of reasons. Even with the most JS heavy apps, 10 seconds is way too long. Most apps take 3-5 seconds for the initial load, gmail is the only app I know to take ~10 seconds. The nice thing about React is that it allows you to generate the template on a node server and send that, so you can cut down the initial load time to a second or two.
In this particular case, the Member homepage, there is a lot going on behind the scenes to render that page. Each row is computed with the most recent data possible, to ensure you see information that is pertinent for you. The pause is purely on the server side, not the client downloading assets. We are working on improving this.
Streaming performance itself has always been top notch. Hard to understand how I can start a streaming movie in less time than it takes to load a list of movies in a browser.