Meta Issue: Performance

[chipcullen]

The biggest issue with the Font Combinator is that it's performance is, well, terrible.

Among the issues:

• 1322 HTTP requests - this is largely due to the request for fonts. Not sure why for the high number, yet, as there are only ~ 600 fonts
• 1.9MB transferred - this is in Chrome. It could be much higher in other browsers that don't support WOFF2.
• Load time:
  • DomContentLoaded: 1.3 sec
  • load: 13.36s
  • Total load: 19.91s

The biggest part of all this is the way I have it written that there are 's generated for every font in the Google Fonts API.

Ideas to mitigate this:

• A curated mode by default that lists fonts that are more complete by default - this would involve me manually managing a list. There would be an optional "turn on every font" option.
  • Combine requests into ganged up requests

I'm personally leaning towards a 'curated' mode - there are over 600 google fonts, and I'd guess maybe 20% of them are worth considering.

One of the core principles that I have with this project is that I need to find it useful, and I'd rather not have to wade through all the less than useful fonts.