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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

danluu.com

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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#101

Post by pbhjpbhj »

smacktoward wrote: post #56

Looking at that first table, one question jumps out at me: what the heck is Jeff Atwood doing on pages at Coding Horror that makes them weigh 23MB? I mean, I'm all for avoiding premature optimizations, but 23MB for one page is just... wow. EDIT: As a sanity check, I just tried loading the CH home page from a cold cache myself. Total weight: 31.26MB . Yowch.

Just been to Atwood's homepage, https://blog.codinghorror.com/.

Looks like there's some lazy loading of later content so I actually get accessible content very quickly, indeed I thought something was up as the page appeared to be only a couple-hundred kB, which didn't match your description.

Scrolling down I continue (in FF Network Monitor) to see content loading - reviewing I see that YouTube is responsible for over 1MB of "base.js" which gets downloaded 7 times, and ¼MB of CSS files (again 7 times over). Now Atwood may be to blame in part but Google ... shouldn't they at least do better?? CodingHorror is loading very large image files [1] (which get scaled) for me, perhaps a "retina" handling issue.

[1] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/blog.codinghorror.com/d1x7zZBk

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#102

Post by [deleted] »

Namrog84 wrote: post #96
ikeboy wrote: post #74

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which cause…

This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics. A nice chart showing how many users are in each bucket of load time would be far more useful. One that you could easily change the bucketsize from 0.1ms to 1 second and these types of 'digging' wouldn't even be a second thought.

[deleted]

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#103

Post by swanson »

ikeboy wrote: post #74

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which cause…

I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#104

Post by ashwinpp »

iLoch wrote: post #46
ferbivore wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the point is that everything should be human parse-able. But most things on the web are not complex applications. Dan Luu isn't trying to use Google Maps over HSCSD, he's trying to read hypertext blogs and Twitter. Do you seriously think Twitter qualifies as a "complex application"?

The concept behind Twitter? No. Twitter? Maybe..? They have a user experience they want to deliver to 9X% of their users, so they optimize for that. For most of Twitter's users, their connection speeds aren't the limiting factor in their experience. If you optimize for the lowest common denominator, that 9X% almost certainly gets a worse experience.

* There is no proof in your statement that currrently 9X% of their users have fast internet connection.

* Even so, it would simply be an artefact of them never bothering to optimize for people with slower internet connections. If they did optimize, a lot of their traffic would come from the so called "lowest common denominator" just as the blog post says it did for Google.

* Finally I find the term "lowest common denominator" misrepresentative because it implies that optimization needs to cater to the slowest connection on earth, which is clearly not the case. If the average speed is above 90% of internet connections (as per Akamai report cited in the blog post) then the distribution of internet speeds is clearly skewed and there's value trying to even cater for median if not the minimum speed.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#105

Post by c22 »

iLoch wrote: post #46
ferbivore wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the point is that everything should be human parse-able. But most things on the web are not complex applications. Dan Luu isn't trying to use Google Maps over HSCSD, he's trying to read hypertext blogs and Twitter. Do you seriously think Twitter qualifies as a "complex application"?

The concept behind Twitter? No. Twitter? Maybe..? They have a user experience they want to deliver to 9X% of their users, so they optimize for that. For most of Twitter's users, their connection speeds aren't the limiting factor in their experience. If you optimize for the lowest common denominator, that 9X% almost certainly gets a worse experience.

So what's up with that character limit?

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#106

Post by zokier »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #5

I'm torn here, in a way. On the one hand light page weights and other such optimizations make the internet better for everyone, on the other, there's a certain point where designing your product to target 3 decades ago (we forget 1990 was 27 years ago) gets a little absurd. I think the greater tragedy is not that the web is bloated (an issue for sure), but that so much of America has internet worse than 3rd world mob…

56k modem spec (V.90) appeared in 1998, so that's just two decades ago. And of course 3G networks appeared mostly in 2004 (in Europe) with (very theoretical) data rates up to 384kbps. About that same era, I recall 256-512 kbps DSL subscriptions being very common. And I can promise that browsing modern web with <512k connection (possibly with quite a bit of latency) will not be very comfortable.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#107

Post by dba7dba »

ikeboy wrote: post #74

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which cause…

Funny anecdote about the freeway system of southern California.

When they were initially planning the system in 1930s, 40s, they were planning to have the system in use for next 100 years. So they built over sized roads (like 10 lane freeway, without having to stop for traffic lights, that go THROUGH center of a major city).

When the system proved so car friendly, more and more people moved in and bought cars. Within in a short period of time (much shorter than 100), the system is completely jammed.

Always look for unintended consequences...

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#108

Post by forrestthewoods »

ikeboy wrote: post #74

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which cause…

Page Weight Matters by Chris Zacharias. http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#109

Post by xxpor »

__jal wrote: post #84
iLoch wrote: post #16

> Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" > Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands…

> Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" Horses on highways would cause accidents. I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router. Analogies work better when there is connective tissue between the concepts in play. More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is…

> I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router.

To be pedantic, if you have a threaded server (thread per connection) slow clients can cause problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#110

Post by ffjffsfr »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #38

Did most of the web suck when we were on 28k or 56k modems? I'd argue that it didn't, and yet even with the light weight of pages back then, it was incredibly slower than today's pages (even heavy ones) load over our much-faster connections. So really, I think what the author is observing is that having experienced high-speed reliable connections , it is very disappointing to move to a much slower connection. For the…

I think average number of requests per site, and average page size in megabytes went up over time. It is much higher now and content we browse is actually very similar - people read news like they did 20 years ago, but now their news site requires 2mb of data when it required 100kb 20 years ago.
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