Or placed below or above other messages, if that would be easier and there is a good reason to keep it.

I'll tag it Performance. If we get loading so fast that it is less than a second to start rendering the new screen on the slowest servers, I don't mind changing it. It's useful to stop people repeat-clicking on slow servers, making them even slower, and generally gives people instant feedback they're moving.

Yeah agreed. As of now even on a 6 CPU 8GB VPS with nginx and Cloudflare, the admin screen can take upwards of 10 seconds to load

My main concern was how it sometimes overlays other important information making it hard to read. That said, I'm pretty sure that every browser I've used had its own screen loading indicator which I why I questioned if this was required at all. Not against keeping it, but it does get in the way of some information and it doesn't seem to display on all screens making it an inconsistent feature.

If there was an option to turn it off, I would turn it off. The majority of servers have decent enough page load times, even the cheaper ones. 10 seconds plus isn't uncommon in my mind and I am pretty sure you can tell that the page is loading from the browser itself.

"on a 6 CPU 8GB VPS with nginx and Cloudflare" - this is a good example of a setup that sounds performant, but really works against that from the point of view of any individual user. Execution isn't parallelised generally (actually the admin zone dashboard now is an exception to that) - so the number of CPUs/cores doesn't speed up any single user, it just helps handle multiple requests at once. VPSs are often slow due to overloading, as rarely are they set up to actually guarantee any particular CPU throughput - and a VPS has significantly more overhead on a server than being on a shared server. Then nginx provides an extra request queue. And Cloudflare routes the traffic through an indirect point with extra potential for congestion etc.

10 seconds is pretty extreme though :(.

"My main concern was how it sometimes overlays other important information making it hard to read" - I don't really understand that, as you've already decided to move away at that point, what are you reading? However, if you click somewhere (not on a link) it closes the loading indicator.

"I'm pretty sure that every browser I've used had its own screen loading indicator" - The thing is, people nowadays (including me) are trained to ignore them. Pages consist of so many JavaScript, CSS, image, font, etc, requests, that if any one of them is on a bogged down server, or a server you can't get a stable route to, it can leave the whole page perpetually 'loading' from the point of view of the status indicator. Also, many sites are using AJAX for loading screens which bypasses the status indicator (something I think browsers need an API for, it's not good).

Hard to get a screenshot as the page is actually loading at the time, but things like messages telling you that you are being redirected are overlaid by the loading indicator. There are more examples, not sure how to describe them, but generally they are informative screens, like the one about cookies being used. I'm not pressing the issue any further, happy with your conclusions about performance improvements determining this.

(Click to enlarge)

Added screenshot for clarity, as I recently realised there is a smaller loading indicator in modal windows which I have no issue with. Wanted to make sure we weren't at odds with what I meant. As you can see, text is obscured.

Ok so thanks for pressing on this. This was a specific issue I was not aware of - the unloading event getting called for a meta refresh. Fixed.