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A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

mike.teczno.com

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Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#41

Post by newman314 »

underwater wrote: post #27
poutine wrote: post #3

His rant doesn't seem too informed: "aggressive anti-performance and apparent contempt for the web by Twitter’s designers" According to his charts most of Twitter's page is JS/CSS and presumably set to heavily cache. Very little is data. Once you've done the first page load Twitter's pages will load quite fast and efficiently. While quite a lot of JS, this is good design, not bad.

Yahoo did a study a while back and found that ~50% of their visitors had a cold cache http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part...

Plus if you access Twitter over SSL, there might not be caching resulting in heavy loads repeatedly.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#42

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

klous wrote: post #30
rowanseymour wrote: post #16

I live in Rwanda and like a sizeable portion of Twitter's userbase, have very slow internet. When Twitter switched to their new design it got a lot harder to open their site... I kept using the old version until they removed it. I don't understand why - it's not pulling down a lot of data, it's not even making that many requests (~50), but this site and other AJAX rich sites just don't seem to work as well as the old…

if you want a more lightweight version of twitter on any browser, try: http://mobile.twitter.com

I used to use that all the time. It's essentially old twitter with a layout that is a little less wide.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#43

Post by mhd »

poutine wrote: post #3

His rant doesn't seem too informed: "aggressive anti-performance and apparent contempt for the web by Twitter’s designers" According to his charts most of Twitter's page is JS/CSS and presumably set to heavily cache. Very little is data. Once you've done the first page load Twitter's pages will load quite fast and efficiently. While quite a lot of JS, this is good design, not bad.

Which is perfectly okay for the regular twitter web client, but we're talking about a single tweet status here, i.e. a page where you arrive by clicking on a link like "Bob Bobson recently stated that frobnication is all gonked up". Then you want to read the full 140 characters of what Bob Bobson said, and whoops, two megabytes.

(Never mind that at least for me, tweets are increasingly often turning up as search engine hits)

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#44

Post by newman314 »

ghein wrote: post #25
DanI-S wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, Facebook's load time is quite phenomenal. It is one of the most feature-laden and complex consumer web applications out there and they still manage to set the bar with regards to speed and multi-platform usability.

Sadly Facebook's tools for other sites are some of the slowest things on the web. That they're attached to every post and so can be called 10+ times per page really doesn't help. Scrolling on TechCrunch with your mouse over the post area is a hilariously pitiful experience.

Actually, since I blocked all Facebook widgets (tracking or otherwise), it has the nice side effect of not loading the comments when I accidentally land on a TechCrunch article.

Makes the site load faster =)

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#45

Post by Zirro »

underwater wrote: post #27
poutine wrote: post #3

His rant doesn't seem too informed: "aggressive anti-performance and apparent contempt for the web by Twitter’s designers" According to his charts most of Twitter's page is JS/CSS and presumably set to heavily cache. Very little is data. Once you've done the first page load Twitter's pages will load quite fast and efficiently. While quite a lot of JS, this is good design, not bad.

Yahoo did a study a while back and found that ~50% of their visitors had a cold cache http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part...

In early 2007. Isn't this likely to have changed in five years?

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#46

Post by ceejayoz »

newman314 wrote: post #41
underwater wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo did a study a while back and found that ~50% of their visitors had a cold cache http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part...

Plus if you access Twitter over SSL, there might not be caching resulting in heavy loads repeatedly.

I'd imagine Twitter's serving `Cache-Control: public` where appropriate.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#47

Post by Timmy_C »

mfringel wrote: post #34

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.

I looks like most of the inline JavaScript is there to handle DOM abstraction and events. Every click essentially needs to be able to build a part of the page client-side.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#48

Post by pstjean »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #39
marknutter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you would like to think so, let me give you a reason to do so: http://www.2ality.com/2012/02/twitter-pushstate.html

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#49

Post by technomancy »

klous wrote: post #30
rowanseymour wrote: post #16

I live in Rwanda and like a sizeable portion of Twitter's userbase, have very slow internet. When Twitter switched to their new design it got a lot harder to open their site... I kept using the old version until they removed it. I don't understand why - it's not pulling down a lot of data, it's not even making that many requests (~50), but this site and other AJAX rich sites just don't seem to work as well as the old…

if you want a more lightweight version of twitter on any browser, try: http://mobile.twitter.com

You can also play user-agent games to get the Android version in your browser. I prefer the regular mobile edition, but it's interesting to poke around; I've found three separate versions of the site just by faking out my user agent.

Re: A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

#50

Post by woobar »

untog wrote: post #38
ChrisLTD wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not when they are clicking on a link in email or other page.

EDIT: misread your comment. Thought you were talking about mobile apps.

Also, I would not call their mobile site 'very lean'. Just got a single twit page on iPhone: 817Kb.

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