The website has been updated today with changes that should improve the loading times of the Study pages.

The Shared Stories list on the study pages is now cached. I have set the "lifetime" of cached stories initially as low as one hour. So eg. if you share a new story, or upvote someone else's story, it may take up to an hour to be reflected in the page. Update: it may take several hours, up to a day to notice a difference because the cache is very conservative atm (probably too much) .

This is obviously a usability problem. How do you signal to users that the content is not immediately updated, but will be eventually? It's not ideal, but I think the tradeoff is worth it. It's not critical for votes, reports, and shared stories to be reflected in real time on the website, and this saves a lot of unnecessary queries on the database.

I will keep an eye on just how many pages are cached, based on the user activity, and then increase gradually the effect of the cache until it provides a significant speed improvement. In theory, updating the Shared Stories list even just once a day should provide more significant gains. But I wanted to think about how that is going to work usability wise so I will finetune it over time.

Since the website has been entirely upgraded to a more complete framework, there may be a few bugs that slipped through my tests. These should be very easy to fix. If you find an issue please let me know and I will fix it asap.