We have rather complex dashboards, up to 20 gadgets. With Jira 3.0 this loaded rather quickly. However after upgrading to 4.0.1 we found that the front page takes a long time to load. It appears that the cause is the AJAX rendering, and also the way that AJAX sends separate HTML requests for all the individual gadgets. This overhead causes the page to take excessive time to load.

We don't really use the AJAX features that much. The ability to re-arrange the gadgets with click and drag is nice, but you only need to do that once and after that you don't touch it much. These small features doesn't seem to be worth the extra long loading time.

On firefox, the loading time can be up to 16 seconds before the Dashboard is fully loaded.

It would be nice to have an option to disabled the AJAX features and go back to the static dashboard of Jira 3.0