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Why is it that the Recent Comments and Recent Posts sidebars are populated through AJAX instead of being generated on the server side, considering that they're not dynamically updated or anything?
(I was thinking of submitting a patch that would have the server send them pre-populated, but recalling this quote, I figured I ought to first see if I can find out the perfectly good reason why it was done this way.)
Since the sidebars are the same on every page, the browser can cache them separately and download them only when they are updated. Before April 2009 they were static HTML.
Were there tests done to find out if this actually results in a speed increase? As they can't be more than a few kilobytes altogether (probably well within the size of a typical TCP packet), I wouldn't be surprised if doing four XMLHTTPRequests and manipulating the DOM actually slowed it down, even if the results were cached.
I'm using Chrome, and the WebKit web inspector is telling me that each page view is spending 200-300 milliseconds in XHR. Not sure if that means it's not caching them correctly or if that really is how long the JavaScript execution takes.
You're right about it not being faster. I had assumed it helped with server load, but the commit message mentions something about Google indexing.
It seems like a better way to do this would be to check the User-Agent and only send the sidebar if the agent isn't Googlebot. Or, if we want this to apply to other search engines, then we could still do it with JavaScript, but just include the content encoded in a <script> in the page's <head>, so it wouldn't need to go through the XMLHTTPRequest.