Live data from Hacker News

Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

blaines-blog.com

11–20 of 83 posts

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#11
Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line.

If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy looking nobody says “no, that will make the website slow.”

The engineers likely do complain it will make the website slow. I have been that engineer. But they are never in a position of power to overrule other parts of the company. This is especially true if it’s not a tech company. Web performance does now show up on the earnings report.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#12
It may seem absurd that the apps is costing Kroger that much but my family's experience backs it up.

In the post-COVID era, my wife has become quite accustomed to digital shopping. We actually live closer to a Meijer, which is basically the Midwest's answer to Walmart, except it's decades older. (You may be able to thank Meijer for Super Walmarts; it's Meijer that proved out the concept of attaching a grocery store to a general superstore for Walmart, and it gave Walmart some difficulty penetrating in to the Midwest so they had to add it to compete.) Of course COVID caused a big app rush and at first everybody's app was pretty crappy, so we just stuck with the closest one.

Over time, Meijer's app slowed down pretty badly, so my wife ended up switching to Kroger. I saw a lot of Kroger bags. One of the biggest problems with the Meijer was that trying to add a second of any item was a synchronous round-trip to a rather busy and slow server, so goodness help you if you wanted, say, 6 bananas. Going from 1 to 6 could literally take 30 seconds on the worst days. And that was just the worst issue, the whole app was generally slow and prone to failure.

But somewhere around two years ago, clearly someone at Meijer got the performance religion and cleaned up their app and website. I still wouldn't call it blazing fast, but I would call it acceptable by modern standards, and it blew away the Kroger app of the time... again, not because it was pushing 120fps with super low latency, but just because it was fairly reasonable to use. Adding five more bananas is now just tapping the button five times, and while I can still kind of see the async requests chasing each other a bit, it pretty much always ends up converging on the correct number in a couple of seconds. So my wife switched back.

I don't know what Kroger's current performance is, because now that we don't have a problem we haven't been seeking solutions. So they've lost thousands of dollars of business over the years to Meijer from us.

An anecdote, of course, but I suspect a common one.

I put this out there in the hope that it will push more people into caring a bit more about performance. I think there's a fairly large range where "normal people" will use a sluggish app or website, and wander away, and if you do manage to rope them into a marketing survey they won't necessarily say it's because it's slow, you'll get other rationalizations, because it isn't a fully-conscious reaction and realization for them... but nevertheless, you'll have a very, very leaky funnel and just reading those surveys may not tell you why.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#13

“conservatively $435,000,000 per year” But how much would it cost to have a few senior engineers fix it, and ensure zero mistakes or missing functionality while doing it? Even if I were CTO of Kroger… nope. I’m not doing it. I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K, unless there’s proof of greater savings. EDIT: Yes, I terribly misread that this is million, not thousand, which makes a lot more sense e…

Vastly, vastly less than that. Even as expensive as engineers are.

And "zero" mistakes is not part of the goal. It clearly wasn't in the requirements during initial development, why would they add it afterwards?

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#14
Maybe it's culture. Software is hard and the less unknowns you have in development the better. Frontend tools have exploded in complexity[1], but they get the job done. There are great alternatives nowadays, like phoenix liveview, but they would require full rewrites and possibly a change in language and software architecture that most teams just can't do, maybe because they are already heavily invested in whatever framework they are using or they can't afford to shift to elixir (or other languages, paradigms...).

So they stay in this marshlands of bloated UI frameworks, and they need to push updates and new features which makes the problem worse.

We seem to try to explain everything in software in technical terms, but sometimes at the end of the day culture and communication plays a larger role I think. Software is built by humans after all.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218003

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#15
post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

What a dystopian world we live in.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#16
post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44863881

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#18
It’s about to get worse. It doesn’t matter if you spend weeks optimising your web performance if visitors have to wait several seconds to go through a proof-of-work JavaScript widget, Cloudflare Turnstile, or a CAPTCHA to prove they aren’t AI crawlers before they can even see your site.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#19
post #13

“conservatively $435,000,000 per year” But how much would it cost to have a few senior engineers fix it, and ensure zero mistakes or missing functionality while doing it? Even if I were CTO of Kroger… nope. I’m not doing it. I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K, unless there’s proof of greater savings. EDIT: Yes, I terribly misread that this is million, not thousand, which makes a lot more sense e…

Vastly, vastly less than that. Even as expensive as engineers are. And "zero" mistakes is not part of the goal. It clearly wasn't in the requirements during initial development, why would they add it afterwards?

Because, if there is even one mistake; the profit losses from that mistake, could easily eat up the savings.

Imagine having to tell management your optimization to save $400K cost $100K in engineer time and caused a $700K outage where the “Add to cart” button sometimes didn’t work. Great job. You’re possibly fired.

(Edit: Due to my misreading, add a few digits to the outage cost.)

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#20

I agree that the problem is product development, but the framing is wrong. Engineers generally have a solid intuition for what will perform well, but when UX designers and PMs with only a vague idea of how these technologies work dreams up an idea, gives a deadline, then the engineers are evaluated on fulfilling those metrics, then the outcome will be obvious.

I disagree - it's often engineering's fault. It's been pretty consistent that a decently specced server, running PHP that was written sometime last century, generating static pages, redis cache in front, and serving static content via nginx, beats the everloving pants off whatever fotm microservice SPA monstrosity modern devs tend to come up with.

The most hilarious if you go to pirate sites (for stuff like comics, manga or movies), and it's 100x faster and works better than the official paid for alternative, even though I'm sure the former runs off some dudes former gamer PC in his bedroom.

Post reply on HN