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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)

#281

Post by Mawr »

marcosdumay wrote: post #233
jeroenhd wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your approach is "I don't care because I have more important things to focus on", you never care. There's always something you can do that's more important to a company than optimising the page load to align with the TCP window size used to access your server. This is why almost all applications and websites are slow and terrible these days.

Well, half of a second is a small difference. So yeah, there will probably be better things to work on up to the point when you have people working exclusively on your site. > This is why almost all applications and websites are slow and terrible these days. But no, there are way more things broken on the web than lack of overoptimization.

"More than 10 years ago, Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. In 2006, Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%."

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

#282

Post by nh2 »

crawshaw wrote: post #20

If you want to have fun with this: the initial window (IW) is determined by the sender. So you can configure your server to the right number of packets for your website. It would look something like: ip route change default via dev initcwnd 20 initrwnd 20 A web search suggests CDNs are now at 30 packets for the initial window, so you get 45kb there.

13 years ago, 10 packets was considered "cheating":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3632765

https://web.archive.org/web/20120603070423/http://blog.benst...

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

#283

Post by hxorr »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #275
oriolid wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may surprise you how heavy Facebook is these days

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

#284

Post by crawshaw »

nh2 wrote: post #282
crawshaw wrote: post #20

If you want to have fun with this: the initial window (IW) is determined by the sender. So you can configure your server to the right number of packets for your website. It would look something like: ip route change default via dev initcwnd 20 initrwnd 20 A web search suggests CDNs are now at 30 packets for the initial window, so you get 45kb there.

13 years ago, 10 packets was considered "cheating": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3632765 https://web.archive.org/web/20120603070423/http://blog.benst...

We are in a strange world today because our MTU was decided for 10mbps ethernet (MTU/bandwidth on a hub controls latency). The world is strange because 10mbps is still common for end-user network connections, while 10gbps is common for servers, and a goodly number of consumers have 1gbps.

The range means MTU varies from reasonable, where you can argue that an IW of anything from 1-30 packets is good, to a world where the MTU is ridiculously small and the IW is similarly absurd.

We would probably be better off if consumers on >1gbps links got higher MTUs, then an IW of 10-30 could be reasonable everywhere. MTU inside cloud providers is higher (AWS uses 9001), so it is very possible.

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

#285

Post by pyman »

ozim wrote: post #271
pyman wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I spent 10 years teaching computer science and some of my ex-students now work at Google, Amazon, Uber, and Microsoft. They still come by to say hi. It's teachers who inspire change, and we do it by talking about the past, present, and future of tech in classrooms, not online forums.

I like reminding students about Steve Jobs. While others pushed for web apps, he launched the App Store alongside the iPhone in 2008 and changed everything. I ask my students, why not stick with web apps? Why go native?

Hopefully, these questions get them thinking about new platforms, new technologies and solutions, and maybe even spark ideas that lead to something better.

Just picture this: it's 2007, and you're standing in front of Steve Jobs telling him: “You don't understand anything about the web, Steve.”

Yeah, good luck with that. For that reason I'll politely decline your offer to prove how much I know about this topic, but you're more than welcome to share your own perspective.

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

#286

Post by [deleted] »

tonymet wrote: post #273

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” opt…

[deleted]

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

#287

Post by popalchemist »

susam wrote: 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…

Not trying to discourage you from adopting better solutions, but the delayed client-side rendering of a dynamic component like a Latex expression is almost (or sometimes literally) imperceptible to the averge user.

There is such a thing as over-optimization. All this SEO-driven performance chasing is really only worthwhile if the thing you're building is getting click-through-traffic in the millions of views.

It's a bit like worrying about the aerodynamics of a rowboat when you're the only one in it, and you're lost at sea, and you've got to fish for food and make sure the boat doesn't spring any leaks.

Yes, in the abstract, it's a worthwhile pursuit. But when you factor in the ratio of resources required vs gain recieved, it is hardly ever a wise choice of how to use your energy.

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

#288

Post by creata »

mr_toad wrote: post #158
djoldman wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood math / latex display via client side js. Why can't this be precomputed into html and css?

It’s a bit more work, usually you’re going to have to install Node, Babel and some other tooling, and spend some time learning to use them if you’re not already familiar with them.

For rendering math to HTML+CSS or SVGs, you can just use Node.js and MathJax. I'm not sure why you'd want Babel.

(You can probably use KaTeX, too, but I prefer the look of MathJax's output.)

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

#289

Post by creata »

djoldman wrote: post #141
susam wrote: 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?

I usually prefer compiling it to HTML or SVGs, but sometimes, if you have a lot of math on your page, bundling MathJax can take up less space. (Not sure if that'd still be true after compression.)

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

#290

Post by pyman »

hnlmorg wrote: post #97
pyman wrote: 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…

That’s already how it works. The binary is a compressed artefact and the stream is a TLS pipe. But the principle is the same. In fact videos streams over the web are actually based on how HTTP documents are chunked and retrieved, rather than the other way around.

Thanks for clarifying that.

My goal was to question the way we do things. Game streaming, for example, works differently. The game runs entirely on a remote server. The server has a GPU/CPU combo that renders the game in real time and user input is sent back to the server via UDP/WebRTC or a TCP tunnel.

Also, native mobile apps work quite differently from both video and game streaming.

Bottom line: we've seen some great innovations over the last 35 years, and I'm hoping to see plenty more. The most important thing is to question everything we do, to have that "yes, but why?" mindset.

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