Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

endtimes.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 324 posts

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

#271

Post by ozim »

pyman wrote: post #250
ozim wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm talking about big ideas. Bigger than WebAssembly. My message was about the future of the www, the next‑gen web, not the past.

OK now I think you don't understand all the implications of the status quo.

Everyone writing about "future view" or "next gen" would have to prove to me that they really understand current state of things.

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

#272

Post by 9dev »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #228
mr_toad wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Containers were invented because VMs were too slow to cold start and used too much memory. Their whole raison d'être is performance.

That's another reason they're so infuriating. Containers are intended to make things faster and easier. But the allure of virtualization has made most work much, much slower and much, much worse. If you're running infra at Google, of course containers and orchestration make sense. If you're running apps/IT for an SMB or even small enterprise, they are 100% waste, churn and destruction. I've built for both btw. The co…

I have wasted enough time caressing Linux servers to accommodate for different PHP versions that I know what good containers can do. An application gets tested, built, and bundled with all its system dependencies, in the CI; then pushed to the registry, deployed to the server. All automatic. Zero downtime. No manual software installation on the server. No server update downtimes. No subtle environment mismatches. No forgotten dependencies.

I fail to see the churn and destruction. Done well, you decouple the node from the application, even, and end up with raw compute that you can run multiple apps on.

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

#273

Post by tonymet »

Software developer’s should be more aware of the media layer . I appreciate the author’s post about 3g /5g reliability and latency. Radio almost always retries, and with most HTTP your packets need to arrive in order.

A single REST request is only truly a single packet if the request and response are both For practical experiments, try chrome dev tools in 3g mode with some packet loss and you can see even “small” optimizations improving UI responsiveness dramatically.

This is one of the most compelling reasons to make APIs and UIs as small as possible.

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

#274

Post by raekk »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #230
zelphirkalt wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance matters, but at least initially only as far as it doesn't complicate your code significantly. That's why a simple static website often beats some hyper modern latest framework optimization journey websites. You gotta maintain that shit. And you are making sacrifices elsewhere, in the areas of accessibility and possibly privacy and possibly ethics. So yeah, make sure not to lose performance unreasonably, b…

This kind of thinking is exactly the problem. Yes, at the most absurd limits, some autists may occasionally obsess and make things worse. We're so far from that problem today, it would be a good one to have. IME, making things fast almost always also makes them simpler and easier to understand. Building high-performance software often means building less of it, which translates into simpler concepts, fewer abstractio…

> It's not a trade-off, it's valuable all the way down.

This.

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

#275

Post by Capricorn2481 »

oriolid wrote: post #142
danielbln wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well Facebook has video on it. Highly unlikely that a static site is going to even approach watching a video.

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

#276

Post by Capricorn2481 »

simgt wrote: post #83
noduerme wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant. Are you seriously telling me now that if my website is 256k or 1024k I'm responsible for destroying the planet? Take it out on your masters. And no, reducing resource use to the minimum in the name of sustainability does not scale down the same way it scales up. You're just pushing the idea that all human…

> the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant Whataboutism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism > You're just pushing the idea that all human activity is some sort of disease that's best disposed of. That's essentially just wishing the worst on your own species for being successful. Strawmaning. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man Every blo…

Wow, are low-effort comments like this really welcome here?

Why don't you read this comment and see if you have the same energy for hamburger eaters that you do for people with websites over 14kb. Because if you don't, it's obvious you're looking to sweat people who actually care about their environmental impact over absolutely nothing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614291

FYI, it's not Whataboutism to say there are more effective things to focus on.

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

#277

Post by Mawr »

qayxc wrote: post #47
vouaobrasil wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd be 100% on board with you if you were able to show me a single - just a single - regular website user who'd care about energy usage of a first(!) site load. I'm honestly just really annoyed about this "society and environment"-spin on advise that would have an otherwise niche, but perfectly valid reason behind it (TFA: slow satellite network on the high seas). This might sound harsh and I don't mean it personally…

Correct. It's even worse than that, they'll say they optimized the energy usage of their website by making it 1kb smaller and then fly overseas for holiday. How many billions of page loads would it take to approximate the environmental impact of a single intercontinental flight?

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

#278

Post by Mawr »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #60
qayxc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be 100% on board with you if you were able to show me a single - just a single - regular website user who'd care about energy usage of a first(!) site load. I'm honestly just really annoyed about this "society and environment"-spin on advise that would have an otherwise niche, but perfectly valid reason behind it (TFA: slow satellite network on the high seas). This might sound harsh and I don't mean it personally…

Perhaps you are right. But I do remember one guy who had a YouTube channel and he uploaded fairly low-quality videos at a reduced framerate to achieve a high level of compression, and he explicitly put in his video that he did it to save energy. Now, it is true that it didn't save much because probably many people were uploaded 8K videos at the time, so drop in the bucket. But personally, I found it quite inspiring a…

Youtube's compression already butchers the quality of anything 1080p and below. Uploading in 1440p or 4K is the only way to get youtube to preserve at least some of the bitrate. There's a 1080p extra bitrate option available on some videos, but it's locked behind premium, so I'm not sure how well it works.

Depending on the type of video this may not matter, but it often does. For example, my FPS gaming and dashcam footage gets utterly destroyed if uploaded to youtube at 1080p. Youtube's 4K seems roughly equivalent to my high bitrate 1080p recordings.

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

#279

Post by LarMachinarum »

filleduchaos wrote: post #227
mousethatroared wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A question as a non user: What are you doing with the extra 500kB for me, the user? > 90% of the time in interested in text. Most of the reminder vector graphics would suffice. 14 kB is a lot of text and graphics for a page. What is the other 500 for?

Text, yes. Graphics? SVGs are not as small as people think especially if they're any more complex than basic shapes, and there are plenty of things that simply cannot be represented as vector graphics anyway. It's fair to prefer text-only pages, but the "and graphics" is quite unrealistic in my opinion.

How much is gained by using SVG (as opposed to a raster graphics format) varies a lot depending on the content. For some files (even with complex shape paths depending on a couple details) it can be an enormous gain, and for some files it can indeed be disappointing.

That being said, while raw SVG suffers in that respect from the verbosity of the format (being XML-based and designed so as to be humanly readable and editable as text), it would be unfair to compare, for the purpose of HTTP transmission, the size of the raster format image (heavily compressed) with the size of the SVG file (uncompressed) as one would if it were for desktop use. SVG tends to lend itself very well to compressed transmission, even with high-performance compression algorithms like brotli (which is supported by all relevant browsers and lots of HTTP servers), and you can use pre-compressed files (e.g. for nginx with the module ngx_brotli) so that the server doesn't have to handle compression ad hoc.

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

#280

Post by Mawr »

lpapez wrote: post #108
simgt wrote: 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…

Being concerned about page sizes is 100% wasted effort. Calculate how much electricity you personally consume in total browsing the Internet for a year. Multiply that by 10 to be safe. Then compare that number to how much energy it takes to produce a single hamburger. Do the calculation yourself if you do not believe me. On average, we developers can make a bigger difference by choosing to eat salad one day instead o…

Or how much energy it took to even get to work by car that day.
Post reply on HN