Minify HTML to Reduce Load time and Data

[devinmatte]

Why?

Currently the HTML returned from conditional is large and riddled with blank newlines. In fact if you go to /spring_evals the page request is 403 kb! This affects load time, and can affect users data usage when visiting the page on mobile data. Conditional is slow, mostly because of the LDAP calls, but we can make an effort to reduce load times on the client when possible.

The Fix

We can use a library called flask-optimize to deal with this at each request. When attaching it to that same spring_evals route, it was reduced from 403 kb to 9.5kb and load time was reduced by a full 6 seconds!

Downsides

We add a new dependency, and may have to deal with adding a few  s. Honestly minimal imo

Okay, so just fix it

I will. As soon as #169 is merged. It's a separate change and I don't want to group them together. There's also a chance for a conflict if I submit a second PR. I'll just wait for the sake of avoiding such conflicts

[audiolion]

Why not just let Apache gzip responses if the browser passes the header that it can accept gzip? Use cloudflare to cache responses and serve them for free from their edge nodes so it is faster and will never touch the conditional server.

You can certainly go this route but handling it in Python will certainly be slower than just letting Apache handle it.

[devinmatte]

So from what I understand, we already use gzip, and it's still quite large. This package is actually quite fast from my experience using it. Also if we ever want to go that route, what downside is there in doing both?

[audiolion]

I am not getting a Content Encoding: gzip header so I do not believe the response is being gzipped, simply adding mod_pagespeed to Apache will do html/js/css minification, gzipping, and much more.

You can absolutely do this in Python, but it will be slower and not as feature complete and bug-free as doing it from Apache, which was built specifically to handle this stuff. I just wanted to throw it out there as an alternative.