I cant help you much with CSS, but after quick test with gtmetrix it looks like the whole website could benefit from some server side optimisation: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/blenderartists.org/5NkNjPCe/
Initial server response time looks very poor. Especially TTFB. From my experience the proper structuring of .htaccess file can shave a lot of response time.
As for the images the solutions that comes to my mind is using CSS image sprites, so there is only one image the browser needs to download instead openning multiple connections to server for multiple thumbnails. The image sprite would need to be generated automatically from multiple thumbs every time new featured artwork is chosen. That is above my capabilities.
Second one are src-set attributes, but that also require auto-generating. This time - multiple versions with different resolutions for every thumbnail (or sprite!). The browser then downloads only the one with minimal scaling ratio relative to the browser viewport size and CSS styling requirements. It is pretty easy to setup if the images are present.
Lastly you can consider using .webp file format - it has size advantage over jpg. With proper compression level the quality can be good enough.
I’ve moved this to a new topic as it was not related to my question.
That is expected; Discourse is a web app and the initial load includes a LOT of client-side logic. Subsequent pageviews require only ‘data’ calls to the backend and are much faster. There have been many discussions about this on meta.discourse.org.
The issue at hand is not the load time of the images, but the impact of the ‘thumbnails’ plugin on the backend load time. It adds a lot of non-cached overhead, which the newer implementation fixes.
No, and I don’t consider that a serious contribution to this topic. The question at hand was how to optimize speed for the current platform. ‘Discard everything and go back to 1996’ is not the answer
Using this page as an example, if you right-click and “View page source”, it seems that a lot of unnecessary (unused?) fluff is being sent to the client.
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