Hacker News Reader

This isn't specific to GitLab or GitHub, but turbolinks, pjax, and friends are really useful when you have a lot of setup that can be shared between pages, i.e. initiating a websocket connection, rendering a header with notifications and an avatar in it, decompressing and parsing your js and css, etc., and you don't want to implement a single page app.

When I refresh the GitLab sign-in page in Chromium, I see that the initial page load takes 40ms to parse css, 250ms to parse and execute js, and then another 70ms after DOMContentLoaded. This is with a warm cache. It's not unreasonable to think that turbolinks might save about 300ms on page loads, which is a respectable performance boost.

The browser will still have to parse and execute it. That where Turbolinks can improve performance.

It comes with it's own drawbacks though.

Actually we just removed Turbolinks the other day, so this is a non-problem. :)