Measured, 4 October 2026
Sakia on a weak connection
A farmer on a poor mobile network will not wait for a heavy page, and cannot open anything with no network at all. We opened the home page of Sakia and of five sites that serve a similar need, in a real browser, on a throttled 3G and 2G network, with a processor slowed four times (an entry-level phone).
First visit
Downloaded, 3G
- Sakia383 KB
- yr.no (a lean reference)790 KB
- timeanddate.com661 KB
- FAO WaPOR portal770 KB
- meteoblue1,307 KB
- meteo.tn (national weather institute)7,948 KB
Loaded after, 3G
- Sakia3.7 s
- yr.no (a lean reference)6 s
- timeanddate.com6.9 s
- FAO WaPOR portal5.3 s
- meteoblue9.3 s
- meteo.tn (national weather institute)43 s
Loaded after, 2G
- Sakia12.9 s
- yr.no (a lean reference)25.7 s
- timeanddate.com24.3 s
- FAO WaPOR portal24.7 s
- meteoblue45.9 s
- meteo.tn (national weather institute)150 sdid not finish
Sakia downloads 383 KB: about half of what the leanest sites download, 3 times less than meteoblue and 20 times less than the national weather site, which did not finish loading in 150 seconds on 2G. For reference, the median mobile web page weighs about 2.56 MB (HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025).
Second visit, and no connection at all
| Site | Second visit (3G) | Works with no connection |
|---|---|---|
| Sakia | 0 KB | Yes |
| yr.no (a lean reference) | 1 KB | No |
| timeanddate.com | 11 KB | No |
| FAO WaPOR portal | 0 KB | No |
| meteoblue | 216 KB | No |
| meteo.tn (national weather institute) | 3,140 KB | No |
After the first visit Sakia opens with zero data, and it is the only one of these sites that still works with no connection: the plan is recomputed on the phone from the last saved forecast. A day's advice then costs about 1 KB of plan data, plus about 76 KB if the farmer plays the spoken advice.
What this does not say
- One run per site, from Tunis, on one day; sites change and results move.
- The other sites do other things (maps, radar, global coverage). This compares the first page a farmer would open for a forecast, not their features.
- Sakia is not ten times lighter than every lean site, and the lean sites are also quick on a second visit. The real difference is the lack of a connection.
- The WaPOR portal is a map application: it painted no text before the load event, so its time is not a time to useful content.
Method, script and raw results: scripts/perf-compare.mjs. The research model that also runs in your browser.