Is this also why the new Google Reader is so slow (they're using a more general framework that doesn't match the old Reader's performance when rapidly paging through article previews)?
How Google makes Google(+) fast
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Re: How Google makes Google(+) fast
#32Google+ is certainly fast, I just wish it were quicker about showing me valid/updated state. I've never used any website where the data I was seeing was so obviously out of date across the board as it is on Google+. Yes, eventually it coalesces towards correctness, but I don't think this model works well for things like notifications and such. "Oh look I have a new notification... oh wait, no I don't, that's from lik…
Facebook is pretty amazing in that respect. They managed to engineer a scaleable infrastructure without making it too obvious that everything is being cached. There are times when it takes a minute or two for my profile picture to change everywhere after I change it in my profile, but aside from minute-or-two scenarios, Facebook's interface (and the real-time notification system) is just amazing in comparison.
Except for the iPhone app, with multi-hour delays required for a refresh to actually load new notifications, comments, etc. It'd be fine if push notifications could simply purge the cache since those arrive instantly even if it takes the better part of a day for new comments to actually be displayed on the post.
Re: How Google makes Google(+) fast
#33There's a major downside to all of this complexity, however, because it degrades really poorly: I routinely see 30+ second page loads in Google Plus because they load a ton of code and you won't see anything until it completes 80-130 requests (warm/cold cache respectively) to load almost 5MB of resources! An ugly, non-interactive 1994-style simple HTML page would be far more useful to me at such times…
In practice, this happens to me multiple times a day on a normal connection and more frequently on congested or hotel crappy WiFi.