They seem to be removing heavy features from often-used pages. I would imagine this change creates quadratic savings in data fetching for the timeline.
Honestly, if that was the reason ("we need to make our mysql faster"), I would strongly prefer if they'd just say that. Certainly more understandable (if not relatable) than this sort of communication.
They've been in a roll nerfing stuff like this ever since MS bought them. See "load more comments" ajax links when there are more than 10 comments in a PR review, or "load diff" when a file has changed more than a few lines. All of these degrade the ability to actually look at changes and review them, which is kind of the whole point of pull requests. But alas, the enterprise must enterprise.
This could be so, but wouldn't a better solution be to prerender popular pages or cache generated HTML (a la memcached etc)? (Having said that I have no idea how modern web apps work, nor what technology stack github is using.)
Caching what? All possible comments everywhere? That’s just another db, not a cache. And having infinite caches is not feasible, the point is to store widely and frequently accessed data, not anyone’s comments on any commit in the repo.
