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Smashing Magazine just got 10x faster

netlify.com

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Re: Smashing Magazine just got 10x faster

#11

Post by bobfunk »

caseydurfee wrote: post #9

"800 ms time to first load to 80 ms" It's a mistake to equivocate TTFB with being 10x faster for the user. It's clickbait. The vast majority of that speedup is not from using static files, but from putting the data on a global CDN (Amazon's Cloudfront in this case - Netlify didn't build their own.) Put it this way: if you have caching, and a page on your site gets hit 1000 times, 999 times it's going to be as fast fo…

We do run our own CDN at Netlify, and that's what allow us to serve the actual HTML pages out of edge caches while handling atomic deploys and instant cache invalidation.

This matters less when you test from New York (where Smashing Magazine hosts their Wordpress version of the site).

Here's how the performance difference looks like for people in Melbourne:

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dbYpJA/https://www.smashingmaga... https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/exYLwO/https://next.smashingmag...

The most important part of this difference comes from Netlify delivering the complete initial HTML in less than 100ms compared to more than 2 seconds wait time for the initial HTML load on the Wordpress version.

I'm sure Smashing will see an noticeable uptick in engagement in many parts of the world due to this (it's an effect we've seen before).

(PS. Movable Type's approach was awesome, but the infrastructure around doing static deploys and full static builds was just not up to the task back then, and browsers were way more primitive, so you would end up needing a monolithic dynamic site for just about anything with some form of user interacion)

Re: Smashing Magazine just got 10x faster

#12

Post by bobfunk »

troymc wrote: post #10
scribu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it feels like an ad campaign, especially since the CMS was on the front page recently. The speed improvements could have been achieved without switching from WordPress, by installing a caching plugin with a CDN option.

If you read the article, you'll find that Smashing tried many different caching plugins for WordPress, and they all had problems.

It's also worth noting that Smashing Magazine is not just articles (and comments), but also a full E-commerce, job board, event page, ticket checkout and introduced a new membership section with subscriptions.

Obviously all of that can still be done with a static front-end today (and with one front-end instead of 4 different ones), but that's actually what's newsworthy and it's hardly what anyone would traditionally think of as a "static website" :)

Re: Smashing Magazine just got 10x faster

#13

Post by [deleted] »

bobfunk wrote: post #11
caseydurfee wrote: post #9

"800 ms time to first load to 80 ms" It's a mistake to equivocate TTFB with being 10x faster for the user. It's clickbait. The vast majority of that speedup is not from using static files, but from putting the data on a global CDN (Amazon's Cloudfront in this case - Netlify didn't build their own.) Put it this way: if you have caching, and a page on your site gets hit 1000 times, 999 times it's going to be as fast fo…

We do run our own CDN at Netlify, and that's what allow us to serve the actual HTML pages out of edge caches while handling atomic deploys and instant cache invalidation. This matters less when you test from New York (where Smashing Magazine hosts their Wordpress version of the site). Here's how the performance difference looks like for people in Melbourne: https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dbYpJA/https://www.smashingmaga…

[deleted]

Re: Smashing Magazine just got 10x faster

#14

Post by sitkack »

caseydurfee wrote: post #9

"800 ms time to first load to 80 ms" It's a mistake to equivocate TTFB with being 10x faster for the user. It's clickbait. The vast majority of that speedup is not from using static files, but from putting the data on a global CDN (Amazon's Cloudfront in this case - Netlify didn't build their own.) Put it this way: if you have caching, and a page on your site gets hit 1000 times, 999 times it's going to be as fast fo…

The probability of hitting a slow asset and hitting the 1-percentile goes up as the product of the number of assets. With 30 independent requests, one has an 80 percent chance of hitting the 5% latency percentile. Ouch.

If your sites have lots of requests, you will have to use a CDN to get good TTVC (time to visually complete). Reduce request counts and pull in the 99.9 percentile latency numbers.

800ms is an engineering flaw used to make their statements more :bold: dramatic :bold:. I will probably downvote netlify posts from now on.

Re: Smashing Magazine just got 10x faster

#15

Post by bwb »

calavera wrote: post #7
matt4077 wrote: post #3

To repeat a comment I made too late to be seen in the CMS announcement thread yesterday: I wish people would actually use open protocols instead of private APIs, at least in cases where both seem to be available. As far as I can see, the only feature this needs that only github provides is pull requests – omitting those would still leave you with a useful CMS, and the information could also be communicated in, for ex…

Hi, Netlify CTO here. You're right, everything that the CMS does currently could also be done with raw Git messages. The CMS is designed to have pluggable backends. We had an early version working with Git directly. We decided to focus in one backend at a time rather than having several half integrated because the core features were evolving too fast to support several backends initially. We plan on support raw Git i…

Awesome work dude, I am really impressed!
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