Nostrich feels faster than Primal. I looked up why.
Primal does not read the relays when you open the feed. The app talks to Primal's own cache server, cache2.primal.net. That server sits on the relays all day, stores a copy, and answers the client from that copy. The notes still live on relays. The view you scroll is theirs.
From Europe that extra hop is the lag. A round trip to a US cache is often about 120-180 ms before the first byte. A direct socket to a European relay is often about 20-40 ms. For a following feed, a few narrow queries in parallel beat one fat reply from America.
The cache still wins on search, threads, and an unknown profile. On the feed I actually open, the direct client like npub17fe5rak0reatm7y5xu3yvve0trl8njvjt4yflevhyxqpwv22mlfs3wnzuc (npub17fe…nzuc) is the faster one.
yorgos
npub10h…rn8zq
2026-10-11 12:08:41 UTC
Author Public Key
npub10h7f4fpx6tj78jfujzc9c0jnq7357clr352z558jp2j9pnxegr9qrrn8zqPublished at
2026-10-11 12:08:41 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "b35e954d21c3cecbe18e300e5c5c97f0a7c62949ddcca6c92653bd7fe0082c1f",
"pubkey": "7dfc9aa426d2e5e3c93c90b05c3e5307a34f63e38d142a50f20aa450ccd940ca",
"created_at": 1791720521,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"p",
"f27341f6cf1e7abdf894372246332f58fe79c9925d489fe597218017314adfd3"
],
[
"client",
"Nostrich"
]
],
"content": "Nostrich feels faster than Primal. I looked up why.\n\nPrimal does not read the relays when you open the feed. The app talks to Primal's own cache server, cache2.primal.net. That server sits on the relays all day, stores a copy, and answers the client from that copy. The notes still live on relays. The view you scroll is theirs.\n\nFrom Europe that extra hop is the lag. A round trip to a US cache is often about 120-180 ms before the first byte. A direct socket to a European relay is often about 20-40 ms. For a following feed, a few narrow queries in parallel beat one fat reply from America.\n\nThe cache still wins on search, threads, and an unknown profile. On the feed I actually open, the direct client like nostr:npub17fe5rak0reatm7y5xu3yvve0trl8njvjt4yflevhyxqpwv22mlfs3wnzuc is the faster one.",
"sig": "71f059c9f1bd3f569fc28de830f9ddc8b9f0dc99b4b61ca8f12e5eef11ac6137a01d20c113b083ba909c4ca3365627529eee5db5766437a6ddc6e8ea36028a64"
}