TOC load is too slow overseas

[kcoleman-marklogic]

Filed internally by Jim Driscoll:

The TOC on docs.marklogic.com loads very, very slowly. It's not hard to guess that it's loading the entire TOC before displaying anything.

The problem with this is that we're now a worldwide country with customers in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, all of whom have slow networks, which multiplies this problem.

I've attached an animated gif which illustrates the problem in Singapore - after loading the docs landing page in about a second, it takes TEN seconds to load and display the TOC.

Note that by regional standards, Singapore has an excellent network. In slower network countries, it can take over a minute to display the TOC.

The fix would appear to be to break up the TOC into sections, and load only the parts that are visible first, then load the rest in the background.

His animated gif (which you can view in internal bug 41245) just visually demonstrates the 10s load he mentions above.

I don't know if there is something we can do about this without rearchitecting the whole TOC or not. It is undoubtedly a beast. AFAICT, we do ship it over compressed, but (I think) with no caching.

I think this is an issue worth considering along with #570 as they're fundamentally the same problem: It's too darn slow to slurp up the docs from half a world away. For the moment, I am going to tag this as a priority issue (because #570 is), and we can discuss priority further.