31–40 of 324 posts
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.
And now try to load the same website over HTTPS
From TFA: > Also HTTPS requires two additional round trips before it can do the first one — which gets us up to 1836ms!
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…
I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.
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.
Right. That’s why all the software from, say, Microsoft works flawlessly and at peak efficiency.
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.
If we want to really fix places with bigger impact we need to change this approach in a first place.
FWIW I optimised the heck out of my personal homepage and got 100/100 for all Lighthouse scores. Which I had not previously thought possible LOL
Built in Rails too!
It's absolutely worth optimising your site though. It just is such a pleasing experience when a page loads without any perceptible lag!
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.
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…
The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket. I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.
And now try to load the same website over HTTPS
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.
You are correct in that TCP packets are processed within the kernel of modern operating systems.
Edit for clarity:
This is a web server only algorithm. It is not associated with any other kind of TCP traffic. It seems from the down votes that some people found this challenging.