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Does Codidact render MathJAX more slowly than StackExchange?
1 answer
As Derek Elkins says, MathJax is rendered client-side both here and on StackExchanges.
That means that Internet connection speed as well as server latency only influence how long it takes until the content is loaded and your browser starts rendering.
The rendering time itself is only influenced by the choice of the JavaScript MathJax rendering library and the overall page HTML layout (in case reflows are necessary) and possibly also all the other rendering processes that are going on.
It seems that the used scripts are currently https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.5/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full for StackExchange and https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js for Codidact.
Maybe there are also specific settings of these libraries that can influence the rendering speed.
Just now I compared the rendering of a simple matrix with about 20 rows pasting it into the ask question form of math.stackexchange/codidact and waiting for the preview to render and while StackExchange was almost instantaneous, Codidact took like half a second to start rendering but didn't take longer, when I increased the number of rows in the matrix. I therefore guess that the delay for Codidact is simply a delay to not constantly update the preview form while StackExchange doesn't do that (I didn't want to publish dummy questions).
Overall I very much expect the pure rendering performance of MathJax to be quite similar on both platforms. One would need more sophisticated setups to really measure it.
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