How One Team Cut a Large Web App's Home Page Load from Over 10 Seconds to Under 1

A developer reports that the home page of a large Meteor 2.16 web app, which took more than 10 seconds in production, now loads in under one second. The gains came from shrinking the JavaScript and CSS each page downloads from about 6,070 KB to 2,434 KB gzip, and cutting the CPU time spent before first paint from 6.1 seconds to 1.5 seconds. Over 1,000 templates were moved out of the main bundle and loaded with their routes, with the lazy code served from a custom-designed CDN. The write-up describes how the bottlenecks were located, the measurement tools built for it, and the pitfalls that broke features along the way. The author notes that some limitations stem from Meteor itself, though the method is not tied to that framework.