GitHub · GitHub Blog
Even small delays add up, and they hit hardest at the exact moments developers are trying to stay in flow
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Earlier this year, GitHub set out to fix that—not by chasing marginal backend wins, but by changing how issue pages load end-to-end.
Key facts
- After broad rollout to all users, approximately 22% of React navigations became instant—up from 4% pre-launch—representing about 15% of total request volume
- The team use HPC (Highest Priority Content), an internal metric closely aligned with Web Vitals LCP, to measure when the primary content (the content users care about) on the page is first rendered
- Their Issues Performance team’s job was to close that gap
- On high-fanout surfaces such as issue lists, dashboards, and projects, eager prefetching amplifies request volume, creates N+1-style access patterns and pushes unnecessary compute onto the system
Summary
When you’re working through a backlog—opening an issue, jumping to a linked thread, then back to the list—latency isn’t a metric. In this post, they'll walk through how the system works and what changed in practice. In 2026, “fast enough” is not a competitive bar. Modern local-first tools and aggressively optimized clients have moved the standard from “loads in a second” to “feels instant.” In this world, users do not benchmark them against old web apps.