Preload across chapter boundries :planned:

[vorl]

The current reader preforms a hard-reload when changing chapters. For shorter mangas (1-4 pages see https://mangadex.org/title/21893/otome-danshi-ni-koisuru-otome) this results in excessive hard reloads/stops.

It seems that the reader currently loads every page for a chapter on load, and I would understand if Mangadex didn't want to increase its bandwidth cost by constantly keeping 2 chapters of manga always loaded.

That being said, I'm willing to take any suggestion that makes the quality-of-life experience for short mangas better.

Ideally, the reader would keep n-number of pages ahead preloaded irrespective of chapter boundaries, but that would probably be a larger rewrite.

If we must keep the existing logic that loads every page for a chapter on load, then I recommend we only allow cross-chapter preloading if the next chapter has <= n number of pages(e.g 4).

At least this way that bandwidth usage would be sort-of fair? If most manga has 18 pages, Mangadex takes the full hit for all of those pages. If we preloaded 1/2 chapters of a 1/2 page manga (1-4 pages), that's still less than standard length manga chapter.

 

[Teasday]

The reader doesn't perform a hard reload when changing chapters, unless you're talking about the legacy reader which I don't care about. It's called legacy for a reason.

In the actual default reader, currently the main thing preventing me from preloading chapter data is the fact that loading a chapter and setting its read marker happens with the same request. Fixing this is going to be tied to writing a better API and updating the read marker system, because it's not a huge priority otherwise.

ETA? No clue, we're working on a full site rewrite.