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A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

mike.teczno.com

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Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#21

Post by pavelkaroukin »

rowanseymour wrote: post #16

I live in Rwanda and like a sizeable portion of Twitter's userbase, have very slow internet. When Twitter switched to their new design it got a lot harder to open their site... I kept using the old version until they removed it. I don't understand why - it's not pulling down a lot of data, it's not even making that many requests (~50), but this site and other AJAX rich sites just don't seem to work as well as the old…

And it is funny - AJAX-related technologies were promoted exactly to make sites more lightweight and more responsive..

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#23

Post by marknutter »

aaronpk wrote: post #13
mortenjorck wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more accurate title might be "The Twitter web client is 2.0 MB."

The problem is that Twitter broke links to tweet pages by using the #! URL structure. Now you can't load a tweet page without loading the entire app. That's bad.

They'll move to pushState and all will be well. Hash-bang URLs were just a necessary stopgap solutions until more browsers supported pushState.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#24

Post by shimon_e »

robin_reala wrote: post #20
shimon_e wrote: post #15

The web will be a better place once everyone has 100mbps and servers have 10gbps. Sites like the verge can load in one second without caching.

Wirth’s Law: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Web data usage != slow software

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#25

Post by ghein »

DanI-S wrote: post #17
erikabele wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - just set your phone to EDGE and pull up a tweet page in your mobile browser and you'll see how long it takes. And not only for the 1st page load but for all others too. I can pull up a Facebook page (while being logged in) and have that served to me in a fraction of the time it takes for Twitter. Compare that to the feature-set and your opinion will change quickly. Just try it, no stats & graphs needed, you…

Honestly, Facebook's load time is quite phenomenal. It is one of the most feature-laden and complex consumer web applications out there and they still manage to set the bar with regards to speed and multi-platform usability.

Sadly Facebook's tools for other sites are some of the slowest things on the web. That they're attached to every post and so can be called 10+ times per page really doesn't help.

Scrolling on TechCrunch with your mouse over the post area is a hilariously pitiful experience.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#26

Post by condiment »

poutine wrote: post #3

His rant doesn't seem too informed: "aggressive anti-performance and apparent contempt for the web by Twitter’s designers" According to his charts most of Twitter's page is JS/CSS and presumably set to heavily cache. Very little is data. Once you've done the first page load Twitter's pages will load quite fast and efficiently. While quite a lot of JS, this is good design, not bad.

What's interesting about Twitter's model is that no data actually comes down to the user when they first request a tweet. Twitter builds the page, loads the layout, and initializes the client-side script, which makes a JSON request to pull an individual tweet after everything has loaded.

This means that to get the requested information on first load, the user has to wait for a 2MB download, followed by another roundtrip Ajax request to twitters tweet retrieval API. This results in the perception of a slow page load, even though the tweet itself comes down the pipe in only 100ms.

In my view, Twitter is an excellent case study in some of the pitfalls of thick-client application design. Mainly that ignoring the first-time-use case will result in widespread perception among users that your app is slow, even when every page view after the first is lightning fast.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#27

Post by underwater »

poutine wrote: post #3

His rant doesn't seem too informed: "aggressive anti-performance and apparent contempt for the web by Twitter’s designers" According to his charts most of Twitter's page is JS/CSS and presumably set to heavily cache. Very little is data. Once you've done the first page load Twitter's pages will load quite fast and efficiently. While quite a lot of JS, this is good design, not bad.

Yahoo did a study a while back and found that ~50% of their visitors had a cold cache http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part...

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#28

Post by bergie »

pavelkaroukin wrote: post #21
rowanseymour wrote: post #16

I live in Rwanda and like a sizeable portion of Twitter's userbase, have very slow internet. When Twitter switched to their new design it got a lot harder to open their site... I kept using the old version until they removed it. I don't understand why - it's not pulling down a lot of data, it's not even making that many requests (~50), but this site and other AJAX rich sites just don't seem to work as well as the old…

And it is funny - AJAX-related technologies were promoted exactly to make sites more lightweight and more responsive..

You could argue that Twitter is more responsive than it would be using server-generated HTML pages. But the initial app download is much bigger than it would be with that method.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#29

Post by underwater »

shimon_e wrote: post #24
robin_reala wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wirth’s Law: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Web data usage != slow software

But the amount of data will also increase relative to available bandwidth. A few years ago a 2MB page would have been unthinkable. Maybe in five years we'll be seeing 10MB of resources delivered for a page load.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#30

Post by klous »

rowanseymour wrote: post #16

I live in Rwanda and like a sizeable portion of Twitter's userbase, have very slow internet. When Twitter switched to their new design it got a lot harder to open their site... I kept using the old version until they removed it. I don't understand why - it's not pulling down a lot of data, it's not even making that many requests (~50), but this site and other AJAX rich sites just don't seem to work as well as the old…

if you want a more lightweight version of twitter on any browser, try: http://mobile.twitter.com
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