Yes, this project is misleading, in fact, in mainland China to visit foreign websites is not slow, there are only two cases, blocked or not blocked, the former simply can not open, the latter fast enough. There are many surfers in mainland China who buy VPN servers located in such as the US and then have quick access to the blocked websites, indicating that the lines are fast enough. If your site is embedded with a JavaScript code come from the blocked website (a limited number, such as Facebook, Google), it will also cause your page can not to load, just remove the js code and nothing else is wrong. It is not recommended to be misled by this site.
As a person living in China for a couple of months and primarily working on foreign sites all day and night I can say this is false. Sites are throttled to hell and magically speed up upon connecting to a VPN... And your VPNs are constantly under attack too.
It's also highly dependant on the time of day. Foreign sites are near unusable from around 7pm onwards
My experience is that if there is a VPS located in the U.S., which only has a static page/file, and there is no CDN, whether it is access from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, or from mainland China, the speed is similar. Access from mainland China will not be significantly slower. I did this test over and over again.
The reason your site 'slows down' may be that your site is blocked, or the embedded Javascript (such as Google Analytics, Adsense, DISQUS) or CSS/Web Font (such as Google fonts) has listed on GFW's blacklist. I feel sorry that my last reply may be not made it clear, I mean that the point of this project is not all the truth (why your site is slow), or even a little misleading. Since running website for several years, I must be honest point out that if the mainland China market make sense to you and you want to keep your website always smooth, the only way is to place the server in mainland China or Japan, all other testing, optimization is a waste of time and money.
I'm noticing it even on obscure sites and resources from obscure sites also. Was watching the network panel waterfall and it can take 4sec to resolve a 1kb script.
If I do a git push to gitlab then it can take 90 seconds to even start responding.
I hate the internet so much here that I'm never returning until the firewall is taken down. Some nights I just give up and go to bed early
In my experience it depended heavily on the city I was in, also I usually just visit a couple days per year and each year, the situation was different from before. Changing infrastructure, changing GFW, who knows...
Your experience differs from mine - some sites won't be blocked outright but will be throttled. I can tell they're throttled because as you said, hit the VPN and they load instantly.
In fact Netbeans is very good at JavaScript and web page edit, it has the most intelligent autocomplete and refactoring I ever seen, it is also free and open source.
In some special environment, such as Electron (Atom shell), that can ignore the cross-browser problem, writing application using native Web API and DOM API and ES6 is elegant and effective.
