When closing tabs I was reminded of the large image that is the splash image for the donorpreferences portal. That image is hosted locally on the frdata boxes. Those hosts are single hosts in each data center and not optimized for hosting large volumes of data.
When looking at timing to load the image as is vs from commons, there is a great discrepancy (on a 100Mb home connection):
| host | rough average | max seen | url |
|---|---|---|---|
| donor prefs | 12000ms | 13006ms | https://donorpreferences.wikimedia.org/extensions/DonationInterface/modules/ext.donationInterface.donorPortal/assets/images/login-page-bg.jpg |
| commons | 150ms | 162ms | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Sunrise_View_of_Inle_Lake.jpg/2560px-Sunrise_View_of_Inle_Lake.jpg |
It may make sense to reference the image directly from commons so that we can take advantage of caching and the CDN that is meant for this purpose.
Also, as a side note, using the 1280px image instead of the 2560px image reliably cuts the average transmission time to ~50ms when hosted on commons.