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

Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

blaines-blog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#31

Post by mwcz »

danielvaughn wrote: post #26
Apreche wrote: post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

Yep. Another issue is that you often simply aren’t given the time to make it performant. Deadlines are heavily accelerated for web products. You’re barely allotted time to fix bugs, never mind enhancements. Most web devs don’t want to make slow sites, they’re not given the opportunity to.

They aren't given the opportunity to, that's true. We've also been in an industry-wide performance drought for so many years that many devs don't even realize how fast websites can be.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#32

Post by alerighi »

Because these day JS frameworks are used even for things where a website with a server side MVC framework like in the old days (in whatever language, PHP, Java, Python, etc) would be just fine. Maybe just to add some stuff like form validation in the frontend whenever needed with jQuery or even plain JS.

Not to say that React is useless, it has its applications, but just 95% of the websites shouldn't need it, and I shouldn't download 20+Mb of JS files just to load the homepage of a site.

Another thing to consider, most people that work in tech have probably gigabit or better internet connections. Unfortunately, the user of the website don't have this luxury, and often use either mobile (4G if lucky) connections, or slow ADSL connection (at my house fiber has still to be brought, and I have a 13mbit ADSL).

I hate when just to load the homepage of a site it takes more than 30 seconds (I'm looking at you, ClickUp!). It shouldn't be acceptable: just use HTTP for what was created for, serving hyper text, and serve me hypertext. I would rather load in continuous small HTML files (that is fast even with slow connections because the latency is typically in the ms order even with ADSL) that download a full JS application each time I access a page.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#33

Post by sgarland »

Apreche wrote: post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

TFA mentions this [0] delightful series of articles, in which it’s calculated that every KB of JS sent to clients cost Kroger $100K/yr.

[0]: https://dev.to/tigt/making-the-worlds-fastest-website-and-ot...

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#34

Post by codingdave »

Apreche wrote: post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

There is a better approach, as an engineer, to get this type of point across. Don't just reject their solution... offer a better one. If they come to you saying they want tracking on a web site, ask what goal they are trying to achieve. Ask them what costs they are paying for the service they want you to implement. And then see if you can design a server-based system that gives them the info they want, and write up a proposal for it that includes the downsides and long-term hidden costs of their solutions. Whatever they are asking you, follow that pattern - treat them like a customer (which they are), determine their needs, determine their budget, and propose solutions that give a full comparison of the options.

Worst case scenario, they say no. But often you'll at least open a dialogue and get involved in the decision making. You might even get your solution implemented. And you are definitely more likely to be consulted on future decisions (as long as you are professional and polite during the discussions).

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#35

Post by ben_w »

zeroCalories wrote: post #3

I agree that the problem is product development, but the framing is wrong. Engineers generally have a solid intuition for what will perform well, but when UX designers and PMs with only a vague idea of how these technologies work dreams up an idea, gives a deadline, then the engineers are evaluated on fulfilling those metrics, then the outcome will be obvious.

It's not just that. I've seen plenty of technical talks where people are showing off (and a few jobs where we were required to use) stuff that's several layers of abstraction more complex than it needs to be.

Right now, I'm converting some C++ game code that is very obviously originally meant for a 68k mac (with resource forks etc.) into vanilla JS. It's marginally easier to work with than SwiftUI + VIPER, and I'm saying that as someone who has been working on iOS apps since the first retina iPod came out and has only 14 months experience of C++ and perhaps about that, perhaps a bit less than that, total experience of JS since getting one of those "lean foo in 24 hours" books from WHSmith using pocket money in the late 90s.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#36

Post by lesuorac »

graemep wrote: post #22
Apreche wrote: post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

> Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. I would say (maybe this is what you mean by consideration on"?) that it has an impact on the bottom line, but this is not obvious and not understood by the people in charge.

It seems fairly trackable though? Like money spend per second of loading time?

You do run into a weird problem where as the site gets faster for the p99 the median speed can get worse as people that originally avoiding the site over speed start to use it more often so you get a worse p99 population than before and the old-p99 creeps down into p50. But also you have more users so that's nice.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#37

Post by gwd »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #10

“conservatively $435,000,000 per year” But how much would it cost to have a few senior engineers fix it, and ensure zero mistakes or missing functionality while doing it? Even if I were CTO of Kroger… nope. I’m not doing it. I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K, unless there’s proof of greater savings. EDIT: Yes, I terribly misread that this is million, not thousand, which makes a lot more sense e…

> I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K

Would you do it to save 1000x that much? Because you're missing 3 zeroes.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#38

Post by evantbyrne »

Results like these are only possible when engineering leads have completely lost the plot. The checkout taking many minutes longer, if true, is bad enough that I doubt the problem is purely UI bloat. Either that or the benchmark itself is cooked.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#39

Post by WJW »

mlinhares wrote: post #28
graemep wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. I would say (maybe this is what you mean by consideration on"?) that it has an impact on the bottom line, but this is not obvious and not understood by the people in charge.

Its always the same reason, the business just doesn't hire people qualified to do the job. If in 2025 you're not a content farm, your business is to get people to buy stuff from you, you don't have a team tracking every millisecond change in your p99 latency and page load speed across multiple devices, you're just incompetent.

Most businesses are indeed incompetent, but that's OK as it is usually not required to be all that competent to still make a lot of profit.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#40

Post by donatj »

Apreche wrote: post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

As for the tracking code from on high, holy hell you are right. We got bought by a big company and suddenly we've got giant support panels in the bottom left and JS loading from random domains we've got no way to keep our content security policy up to date with updated domains because they're out of our hands.
Post reply on HN