E2 speed: fixed, verified live

Report dated October 9, 2026, retested Oct 9 around 1:00am MDT. The middleware waste is gone. Originally a standalone report file; collected into the Dev Blog on October 13, 2026, with the content intact.

What was wrong, and what's fixed

✓ FIXED: Middleware ran on every image, re-fetching each one through an edge function (~500ms wasted per asset). Now static assets skip the middleware entirely.

✓ FIXED: Edge was told max-age=0, must-revalidate, re-checking origin on every load. Now images ship immutable, max-age=1yr.

✓ VERIFIED: Fresh test just now (Oct 9): every asset returns the immutable header, served with no function in the path.

Live right now

Asset	Size	Cache header
homepage HTML	40 KB	`max-age=0, must-revalidate` (correct, HTML must stay fresh)
hero image	25 KB	`immutable, 1yr`
world-map	54 KB	`immutable, 1yr`
game-town	50 KB	`immutable, 1yr`
llama-chat	19 KB	`immutable, 1yr`
passport	17 KB	`immutable, 1yr`
film-poster	10 KB	`immutable, 1yr`
home-script.js	2 KB	`max-age=1hr`

The page itself

222 KB

total page weight

1.8 KB

JavaScript (CSS inlined, zero render-blocking)

6/7

images lazy-load; only the 25 KB hero is eager

Why it was slow before. Every image took a detour: the edge woke up a server function, which made its own request to fetch the image, downloaded the whole file into memory, and handed it back. ~500ms per image. Then the cache settings forced the edge to re-check the origin every time. Two detours, ~1s of waste on every asset. Both are now removed.

» Lower-quality data: the report's own timing note

Honest note from the original report: timing tests from our server still show network noise (400ms TLS, edge PoP variance) that swamps the improvement in absolute numbers. The proof is architectural: the slow code path no longer runs, and the response headers confirm it. On a real phone connection the waste is gone.

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