A single tweet page is 2.0 MB • Hacker News Board

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#31

Post by recoiledsnake » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:04 PM UTC

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.

Unfortunately bandwidth has not kept up with the rate of Moore's law(unrelated one, I know), so it is becoming a bottleneck for faster computing(along with spin disk speeds) for a large section of people.

And even if you have large bandwidth, the latency that comes into play is another factor, not to mention folks opening 50 tabs which causes delays in opening and rendering a new one.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#32

Post by shimon_e » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:08 PM UTC

underwater wrote: post #29

shimon_e wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which at 100mbps will take about 1 second.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#33

Post by ChrisLTD » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #5

File this under "annoying to developers and no-one else". Twitter obviously caches 99% of this stuff. I absolutely agree that 2.2MB on one page seems absolutely insane, but that doesn't match up with the experience every time you load the page. And I imagine it's pre-caching code that runs on other pages as well, so you most likely only ever take that download hit once. Yes, they should bring that amount down. No, it…

Shouldn't it be a higher priority? More and more web users are accessing sites from low powered devices with slow connections that might even have data caps (think tablets or netbooks on 3G networks).

Twitter pages don't even seem particularly complex functionally or graphically, so why should the payload be so large?

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#34

Post by mfringel » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:10 PM UTC

Several people in this thread state "It's cached, so why does it matter?"

So, even ignoring the issue with cold caches, how about the two megabytes of code that the browser may need to go through to render the page?

What on earth is twitter doing on a given page that needs two megabytes of code?*

* As of March 2012, for I'm sure this will look silly when there are 2 gigabyte pages, 20 years from now.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#35

Post by cbs » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:14 PM UTC

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.

And once everyone has that for a little while it will become slow and painful again.

Remember dailup back in the day? When a T1 would have been overkill for a single household? Look at those numbers from today's perspective: a T1 is only 1.5 Mbps, thats just 192 KBps.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#36

Post by Isofarro » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:14 PM UTC

johncoltrane wrote: post #18

All of the comments here could be shortened to "It's cached so it doesn't matter" as if the main problem was "2 MB is too large hence loading is too slow". But the problem here (according to the author and I tend to agree with him) is that one needs to load too much junk for too little actual content; whether the junk in question is cached or not. Now, ideally, a tweet's 140 characters shouldn't weight 2 MB but Twitt…

A retweet is just a post request. A follow this person is a post request. Those can both be done with a simple HTML form.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#37

Post by underwater » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:17 PM UTC

shimon_e wrote: post #32

underwater wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which at 100mbps will take about 1 second.

True, but we're not going to instantly switch everyone on the planet to those speeds.

My parents have only upgraded to "high speed" 512kbs in the last few years. My 80 year of Grandfather is still on dial up. I don't think expecting him to wait 5 minutes to load a Tweet is reasonable.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#38

Post by untog » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:20 PM UTC

ChrisLTD wrote: post #33

untog wrote: post #5

File this under "annoying to developers and no-one else". Twitter obviously caches 99% of this stuff. I absolutely agree that 2.2MB on one page seems absolutely insane, but that doesn't match up with the experience every time you load the page. And I imagine it's pre-caching code that runs on other pages as well, so you most likely only ever take that download hit once. Yes, they should bring that amount down. No, it…

Shouldn't it be a higher priority? More and more web users are accessing sites from low powered devices with slow connections that might even have data caps (think tablets or netbooks on 3G networks). Twitter pages don't even seem particularly complex functionally or graphically, so why should the payload be so large?

More and more users are on mobile devices, sure. But those load up the mobile version of the Twitter site, which is very lean.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#39

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #23

aaronpk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would like to think so, but they haven't yet. They don't even load any page content, so that you don't get URLs like http://twitter.com/stuff/1234/things#!/different/stuff

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#40

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #23

aaronpk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]