How are they doing this ? This sounds surprisingly similar to Gatsbyjs ...Except it's real-time .
Anybody know how drop-in this is for existing react code ?
Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
41–50 of 172 posts
Re: Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it provides a robust, consistent, isomorphic framework which many people have decided that certain benefits (for us common tooling, maintenance, consistent implementation across the org, write once run twice isomorphism) outweigh the costs (interactable time, download size, etc). Everyone has to make their own choices, but this news was not surprising and did not change our opinion.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: So, the developer experience trumps the user experience, in an industry where fractions of a second of load time can cost a company customers and conversions?
If all their home page is is a bunch of images and hyperlinks, then I imagine removing React made a lot of sense.
Re: Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: So, the developer experience trumps the user experience, in an industry where fractions of a second of load time can cost a company customers and conversions?
Life is full of trade-offs, gaining 1% more customers for a 10% increase in your engineering costs is not always a good deal. Being customer-centric is good, but not at all costs.
At 1 second, it's closer to a 5% loss. 5 seconds, 20%. 10 seconds is a whopping 50% loss.
And yes, I've seen a lot of landing pages which are not viewable, let alone interactable, for 5+ seconds, an effect exacerbated by mobile.
Re: Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
#44Today we learned: Removing an advanced library from a simple project increases performance. Sorry for being sarcastic but don't you also find this too obvious?
I think it's the 50% part that we're meant to pay attention to. For me that's a pretty drastic, "why would you ever put this on the client side now that you know this" kind of thing.
What is the magnitude of the 50%, is what would be nice to know. If talking 50ms to 25ms, would be seem less big a deal than say 500ms to 250ms.
Re: Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
#45Today we learned: Removing an advanced library from a simple project increases performance. Sorry for being sarcastic but don't you also find this too obvious?
Today we learned: Removing an advanced library from a simple project increases performance.
The library that slow down the UX terribly is "advanced" while the project that is being the victim is "simple".
Re: Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: So, the developer experience trumps the user experience, in an industry where fractions of a second of load time can cost a company customers and conversions?
'premature optimization', build it first, optimize later, react helps a lot with the first part
If you can't gain traction in a market due to lost conversions, you'll never have a chance to optimize it.
Not to mention that some infrastructure choices make it really hard to optimize later, if not impossible (sans re-writes).
Also worth noting: the phrase "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" had a very different connotation when first uttered:
Re: Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
#47I was at the All Things Open conference this week, and Yehuda Katz gave a talk on Glimmerjs[0]. It was enlightening. The size of your front-end application is generally dominated by view code. So, they precompile views into a super simple set of binary VM instructions (making your views very compact). These views don't go through the JS compile / parse phase on the client (saving hundreds of ms, up to seconds on slow…
Considering the various components of the front end stack - increasing the number and depth of the turtles is a win now?
That lady was right - turtles all the way down!
Re: Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: So, the developer experience trumps the user experience, in an industry where fractions of a second of load time can cost a company customers and conversions?
Calm down. This is for a single, static landing page.
> Calm down.
A rather unnecessary statement, don't you think?
> This is for a single, static landing page.
Which at one point wasn't a static landing page. Netflix has something of a captive market at this point in time; but could a newer startup scrambling to gain users afford to make the same choices?
Re: Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: So, the developer experience trumps the user experience, in an industry where fractions of a second of load time can cost a company customers and conversions?
Bad UX and buggy implementation can also cost a company customers and conversion. Sometimes the trade off is worthwhile.
You can't lose customers you never converted in the first place.
Does React really eliminate the potential for buggy implementations? Also I'm fairly certain that UX has more to do with design than your choice of frameworks.
Re: Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
#50My experience with React has not been good. A gullible manager bought into "react everywhere" hype, flew in consultants for training and then proceeded to have a dozen pages on the website written in React. It's important to note that all but one was either completely static or a simple form with less than 5 fields. This project did not go well. It took months to develop, has 0 test coverage, numerous bugs and doesn'…
I've see this go down before. React was the wrong choice but I'd put the blame right at the feet of the consulting firm. Let me guess, the budget was under $5M but the firm was one of the large ones probably being used elsewhere in the company right? I work for a very very large consulting firm, anything under $30M is not worth getting out of bed for them. Projects like this get staffed by nobodies and run by nobodie…
I'd put the blame on the manager for not knowing better. I mean s/he is the gatekeeper for company resources.