Basecamp Performance: Faster Pings and Campfires

We’ve just shipped another round of performance improvements to Basecamp, this time to Pings and Campfires. Now your chats will load faster and feel snappier. How much faster?

Let’s take a look.

We’ve reduced the amount of HTML being rendered in every line of chat by including only what’s necessary on the initial load and then retrieving extras like menus and Boosts on-demand.

For example, this busy chat room in our own account routinely downloaded, parsed and displayed over 1 MB of HTML…

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After the change, the payload is smaller by more than 50% to less than 500 kB…

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Now time to wait between when you hit a link and seeing the Campfire chat is much less because there is less data to download and less HTML for the browser to parse and display on the screen.

Here’s another chart that shows stats measuring how long it takes to display the page (time to Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)) compared over time. Across the board, every metric is improved considerably—and even more so for the most active chats.

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Focus on speed

Speed is one of our core principles, along with simplicity, ease of use, and clarity. We relentlessly pursue ways to make Basecamp faster, easier to understand and a joy to use.

Reducing the HTML payload in Campfires and Pings means you get to see your chats sooner while using less bandwidth and less energy (think battery life). And this change is available for all customers on all platforms—web, macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.

Enjoy the faster Basecamp!