Mark Jaquith

When your posts get a lot of comments, performance can be a concern. The generation of the comment HTML and the delivery of all that HTML can slow down your page loads. This plugin has pages load without comments, and then uses a secondary AJAX request to pull down the comments. Navigating through the pages of comments is also handled via AJAX. On my test install with 100 comments per page, the <code>onload</code> event fires 2x faster. The HTML is generated by the server 6x faster. The HTML downloads 3x faster. The uncompressed size of the HTML is reduced by a factor of 17.
Initial development of this plugin was commissioned by Google — many thanks!

AJAX Comment Loading

Loads comments with a secondary AJAX request, including comment paging. Speeds initial loading of the page.

AJAX Comment Loading vs Iptanus File Upload