Oh the clouds explain a lot about the people I've seen having performance issues in places where I don't - I use dark mode exclusively. I don't have issues on the pages with supposed memory leaks, weirdly, despite having them open literally all day. In any case, huge support. There's a lot of things happening here that really don't have to be happening that are detrimental to the site's performance.

Yeah the avatars are just absurd. It really shouldn't be hard to compress the layers of the lead wolf and crop to avatar size when it's selected, store that server-side, and use that as the image instead of slapping the entire wolf in there. Lorwolf is painful on slow connections and for what? Animations that don't even look… nice? My wolf roller-skates across the mine when they shove the cart around. That's not really worth the bandwidth and memory… the composite image layers for a full minecart is just silly, man….

Posting to say that I've reworked the OP to have more details and be more readable. I should not be allowed to post in the mornings, lol.

I've also included some information provided by those who had posted here, thank you for pointing them out!

The wolf image thing probably explains why it takes so long to load the flea market listings, even though I have good internet. I don't know why the devs chose to display images this way, but it doesn't seem very efficient.

@Veradana It's so they don't have to host every single wolf image, and saves on hosting space. Hosting individual layers of all the colors is simpler on a site's bandwidth, rather than having 50,000 different images for each individual wolf.

Support!

After reading this, it definitely explains why the browser on my phone crashes from time to time when grinding for WWs on mobile..

Hm. Does switching to dark mode actually help? I notice the stars are animated as well.

I have more and more difficulties understanding the tech choices of LW dev. Doing a pre-render of all these pictures only has advantages regarding the distribution of the site. In the future, less dynamically generated content means an easier distribution via a CDN. There is also the use of Azure that I don't understand, it's one of the most expensive cloud providers out there, so it doesn't really make sense to use it now, compared to better sized and cheaper options.

@Rabscuttle

Yes. The stars are animated, but they're animated through CSS, unlike the clouds which is through HTML5 canvassing. CSS animations have a lower performance impact than the way the clouds are animated, so it is indeed a way to alleviate some strain. I'm not sure why they're animated using different methods, but it makes dark mode the better option in that regard.

Support, this needs some serious reworking before more features are added that will make optimization an even greater workload for the devs.