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A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

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Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#141
post #74

I just checked my home page [1] and it has a compressed transfer size of 7.0 kB. / 2.7 kB main.css 2.5 kB favicon.png 1.8 kB ------------------- Total 7.0 kB Not bad, I think! I generate the blog listing on the home page (as well as the rest of my website) with my own static site generator, written in Common Lisp [2]. On a limited number of mathematical posts [3], I use KaTeX with client-side rendering. On such pages…

I never understood math / latex display via client side js.

Why can't this be precomputed into html and css?

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#142
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. Is it really? I was surprised to see that surfing newspaper websites or Facebook produces more traffic per time than Netflix or Youtube. Of course there's a lot of embedded video in ads and it could maybe count as streaming video.

Cate to share that article, I find that hard to believe.

No article sorry, it's just what the bandwidth display on my home router shows. I could post some screenshots but I don't care for answering to everyone who tries to debunk them. Mobile version of Facebook is by the way much better optimized than the full webpage. I guess desktop browser users are a small minority.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#143
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. That’s why all the software from, say, Microsoft works flawlessly and at peak efficiency.

This. It's exactly why Microsoft use modern frameworks such as React Native for their Start Menu used by billions of people every day.

And probably the reason why I have to restart it at least twice a week.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#144
14kB is a stretch goal, though trying to stick to the first 10 packets is a cool idea. A project I like that focuses on page size is 512kb.club [1] which is like a golf score for your site’s page size. My site [2] came in just over 71k when I measured before getting added (for all assets). This project also introduced me to Cloudflare Radar [3] which includes a great tool for site analysis/page sizing, but is mainly a general dashboard for the internet.

[1] https://512kb.club/

[2] https://anderegg.ca/

[3] https://radar.cloudflare.com/

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#145
post #107
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about video streaming, I have a question for big tech companies: Why? Why are we still talking about optimising HTML, CSS and JS in 2025? This is tech from 35 years ago. Why can't browsers adopt a system like video streaming, where you "stream" a binary of your site? The server could publish a link to the uncompressed source so anyone can inspect it, keeping the spirit of the open web alive. Do you realise ho…

I see you mistake html/css for what they were 30 years ago „documents to be viewed”. HTML/CSS/JS is the only fully open stack, free as in beer and free and not owned by a single entity and standardized by multinational standardization bodies for building applications interfaces that is cross platform and does that excellent. Especially with electron you can build native apps with HTML/CSS/JS. There are actually web a…

Practically it is owned by Google, or maybe Google + Apple

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#146
post #11

Missing 2021 in the title. I know it is not the exact topic, but sometimes I think we dont need the fastest response time but consistent response time. Like every single page within the site to be fully rendered with exactly 1s. Nothing more nothing less.

I think the advise is still very relevant though. Plus, the varying network conditions mentioned in the article would ensure it’s difficult if impossible to guarantee consistent response time. As someone with spotty cellular coverage, I can understand the pains of browsing when you’re stuck with that.

Yes. I don't know how it could be achieved other than having JS rendered the whole thing, wait until time designated before showing it all. And that time could be dependent on network connection.

But this sort of goes against my no / minimal JS front end rendering philosophy.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#147
post #7

The overlap of people that don’t know what TCP Slow Start is and those that should care about their website loading a few milliseconds faster is incredibly small. A startup should focus on, well, starting up, not performance; a corporation large enough to optimise speed on that level will have a team of experienced SREs that know over which detail to obsess.

This idea that performance is irrelevant gets under my skin. It's how we ended up with Docker and Kubernetes and the absolute slop stack that is destroying everything it touches.

Performance matters.

We've spent so many decades misinterpreting Knuth's quote about optimization that we've managed to chew up 5-6 orders of magnitude in hardware performance gains and still deliver slow, bloated and defective software products.

Performance does in fact matter and all other things equal, a fast product is more pleasurable than a slow one.

Thankfully some people like the folks at Figma took the risk and proved the point.

Even if we're innovating on hard technical problems (which most of us are not), performance still matters.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#149
post #89
post #85

How relevant is this now, if you have a modern server that supports HTTP/3? HTTP/3 uses UDP rather than TCP, so TCP slow start should not apply at all.

> How relevant is this now Very relevant. A lot of websites need 5 to 30 seconds or more to load.

Slow start is about saving small-integer-numbers of RTT times that the algorithm takes to ramp up to line speed. A 5-30 second load time is an order of magnitude off, and almost certainly due to simple asset size.
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