Question

I have a web application which makes quite a few AJAX requests. Some of them are very light, others are heavy.

I have a loading screen that is really useful for the heavy requests, but on the light ones it is just a(n annoying) flicker.

I could just avoid displaying the loading screen for the light requests, but here’s the catch: I expect that those light requests might still take a while when the user is in a remote (slow) network, making them useful and not at all an annoying flicker.

I’ve thought about measuring latency with a light request every couple of page loads, but that will probably get complicated easily (are there libraries already made for this?)

Anyway, is there a standard solution to this issue? What would you do?

Answer 1

There’s really no way (that I know of) to measure the time it takes for the AJAX request to complete beforehand. If there is, I’d like to know about it!

What I’d do is to introduce the loading bar after a set amount of delay. A respectable delay would show the loading bar on the heavy AJAX requests, (hopefully) prevent the loading bar from displaying on light AJAX requests, and gracefully fall back to displaying it when an AJAX request takes abnormally long.

This doesn’t stop the flicker though — there’s still that chance. But I imagine that this will significantly reduce the flicker on unnecessary occasions.