GitLab pages do not have HTTP compression enabled
GitLab pages, such as for gstreamer's rust documentation have no HTTP compression enabled, so megabytes of javascript and fonts are transferred. Loading a page on a fairly fast connection takes 13-15 seconds.
The reduction in size transferred would be >90% if gzip or deflate were enabled. Not sure where this needs to be done, whether in GitLab or nginx or somewhere else.
The cache also expires every 10 minutes and all this will be re-downloaded. At least in theory. In practice, due to some reason search-index.js
(6MB) is re-downloaded on every page load (this is probably not an infrastructure problem), so this is very bad for performance. Is there a way to selectively set cache control in pages for static assets like fonts that will basically never change?
Google pagespeed insights gives us a score of 53, which affects page rank, and likely causes pages to show up lower in search results: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https://gstreamer.pages.freedesktop.org/gstreamer-rs/gstreamer/enum.StateChangeSuccess.html
The two biggest in that are enabling text compression (reduces load time from 37s to 9s) and improving the initial server response time (reduces load time by one second), which are infrastructure issues.
CC: @slomo