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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)

#21
post #10

Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environmental impact of our network is not negligible. Given the snarky comments here, we clearly have a long way to go. EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of red…

Absolutely agree with that. I recently visited the BBC website the other day and it loaded about 120MB of stuff into the cache - for a small text article. Not only does it use a lot of extra energy to transmit so much data, but it promotes a general atmosphere of wastefulness.

I've tried to really cut down my website as well to make it fairly minimal. And when I upload stuff to YouTube, I never use 4K, only 1080P. I think 4K and 8K video should not even exist.

A lot of people talk about adding XYZ megawatts of solar to the grid. But imagine how nice it could be if we regularly had efforts to use LESS power.

I miss the days when websites were very small in the days of 56K modems. I think there is some happy medium somewhere and we've gone way past it.

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

#22
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.

> a corporation large enough will have a team of experienced SREs that know over which detail to obsess.

Ahh, if only. Have you seen applications developed by large corporations lately? :)

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

#23
post #19
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on who your clients are and where they are. https://www.mcmaster.com/ was found last year to be doing some real magic to make it load literally as fast as possible for the crapiest computers possible.

The site is very fast indeed

I want to buy fasteners now.

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

#25
post #18
post #10

Aside from latency, reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future. The environmental impact of our network is not negligible. Given the snarky comments here, we clearly have a long way to go. EDIT: some reply missed my point, I am not claiming this particular optimization is the holy grail, only that I'd have liked for added benefit of red…

It's not low-hanging fruit, though. While you try to optimise to save a couple of mWh in power use, a single search engine query uses 100x more and an LLM chat is another 100x of that. In other words: there's bigger fish to fry. Plus caching, lazy loading etc. mitigates most of this anyway.

Engineering-wise, it sometimes isn't. But it does send a signal that can also become a trend in society to be more respectful of our energy usage. Sometimes, it does make sense to focus on the most visible aspect of energy usage, rather than the most intensive. Just by making your website smaller and being vocal about it, you could reach 100,000 people if you get a lot of visitors, whereas Google isn't going to give a darn about even trying to send a signal.

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

#26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently used an electric car charger where the charger is controlled by a mobile app that's basically a thin wrapper over a website. Unfortunately I only had a 0.25 Mb/s Internet plan at the time and it took me several minutes just staring at the splash screen as it was downloading JavaScript and other assets. Even when I got it to load, it hadn't managed to download all fonts. Truly an eye-opening experience.

Why can't we just pay with a payment card at electric chargers? Drives me insane.

These chargers have an RFID tag too, but I'd forgotten it in my jacket, so it was mobile app for me.

There are some chargers that take card payments though. My local IKEA has some. There's also EU legislation to mandate payment card support.

https://electrek.co/2023/07/11/europe-passes-two-big-laws-to...

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

#28
It seems the better solution is to not use HTTP server software that employs this slow start concept.

Using my own server software I was able to produce a complex single page app that resembled an operating system graphical user interface and achieve full state restoration as fast as 80ms from localhost page request according to the Chrome performance tab.

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

#29
post #6
post #4

I’d care about this if I was selling in India or Africa. If I’m selling to cash cows in America or Europe it’s not an issue at all. As long as you have >10mbps download across 90% of users I think it’s better to think about making money. Besides if you don’t know that lazy loading exists in 2025 fire yourself lol.

It really depends on who your clients are and where they are. https://www.mcmaster.com/ was found last year to be doing some real magic to make it load literally as fast as possible for the crapiest computers possible.

Do you have any idea what they actually did? It would be interesting to study. That site really is blazing fast.

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

#30

It seems the better solution is to not use HTTP server software that employs this slow start concept. Using my own server software I was able to produce a complex single page app that resembled an operating system graphical user interface and achieve full state restoration as fast as 80ms from localhost page request according to the Chrome performance tab.

TCP settings are OS level. The web server does not touch them.
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