I'm experiencing severe slowdowns and crashes when trying to sign up for a website. Specifically, every time I select my country from a dropdown, my browser becomes sluggish, and it completely freezes for up to 30 seconds after trying to select my state and school. Upon investigation, I found that the site is sending a huge JSON response of 2.3MB when I make these selections—the response seems to include a comprehensive list of nearly every college in the US. It feels like the website is trying to render this enormous list in the dropdown, and I'm wondering if this is poor optimization on their part or if it indicates a problem with my device. For anyone who wants to see what I'm talking about, you can navigate to this site, select a course, click on start/sign in, and then choose the United States as the country.
4 Answers
Browsers aren't designed to efficiently process large text-based data like JSON. This issue isn't unique to your situation; it can apply to JavaScript, CSS, and other formats as well.
Yeah, selecting a course shouldn't be causing such a massive response. The site could definitely use better optimization. Maybe they should consider paginating the dropdown options or using a search function instead of loading every college at once.
I’d suggest checking out tech support forums if you're having issues with this website. But really, sending 2.3MB of JSON for a dropdown is just excessive. They should implement search or at least pagination to lighten the load instead of dumping all that data into the DOM at once.
That size is on the larger side, but a decent modern computer should handle it fine. I’ve got a solid setup, and that page loaded without a hitch for me, even with the uncompressed size being quite large.
Agreed! It’s a clear sign of poor optimization. They really should know better about using techniques like lazy loading or just basic performance practices.