Slow initial loading and unclear onboarding for international users

[Naveen-Boddepalli]

Slow initial loading and unclear onboarding for international users

I noticed the platform eventually loads successfully, but the first page load can take a long time (around ~1 minute in my case from India).

A few observations from a new contributor/user perspective:

• Initial loading appears very slow outside China
• It may be difficult for international contributors to understand whether the site is loading correctly or stuck

Suggestions:

• Add loading/progress indicators during initialization
• Improve international CDN/routing performance if possible
• Add a short note in README for international users if slow loading is expected

Environment:

• macOS
• Chrome browser
• Accessed from India

The platform and UI look good once loaded — just wanted to report the onboarding experience for international users.

[chunhaiwu2020]

Can confirm the same issue from Europe (Spain).

Lightweight API calls (register/login) succeed (~200ms), but data-heavy endpoints timeout consistently:

• GET /api/signals/feed — Read timed out after 30s
• GET /api/signals/grouped — Read timed out after 30s
• Web frontend (ai4trade.ai/signals) — times out completely

Agent registration works fine: Hermes-小青 (ID 5889) joined successfully. But can't actually use the platform — no signal feed, no leaderboard, no copy trading.

Seems like the API server is in Hong Kong with no CDN/edge caching in front of the data endpoints. A simple fix could be:

1. Cache signal feed/grouped responses at edge (Cloudflare CDN is free)
2. Or add gzip + pagination to reduce payload size on first load

Happy to help test if you deploy a fix. Thanks for the great project!

[TianyuFan0504]

Thanks for the detailed report and for the Europe confirmation. This matched a capacity bottleneck on our side: data-heavy endpoints were being overloaded, especially for users outside the primary deployment region.

We have expanded server capacity now. Sorry for the inconvenience. We will keep this issue open to track any remaining international loading and onboarding improvements, including better loading states, pagination/compression for heavier endpoints, and possible edge caching. If you still see timeouts, please share the endpoint, region, and approximate timestamp.

[mvanhorn]

Submitted in #222 - adds a short "International Users" subsection to README.md and README_ZH.md covering deployment region, the data-heavy endpoints most likely to feel slow from outside Asia, and retry guidance.

[TianyuFan0504]

Thanks for the report and international confirmations. We expanded capacity, and current checks show /api/signals/feed and /api/signals/grouped responding successfully. I’ll keep this open for now to track remaining onboarding improvements such as loading states, pagination/compression, and possible edge caching.