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System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

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Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#51

Post by radicalbyte »

pedalpete wrote: post #44
lukaszkups wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a webdev. I had to speed up web e-mail client, written in angular.js. Besides splitting huge request into couple smaller, async ones (huuge speed improvement) I've also switched downloading files from CDN to app server itself - that gives additional 4sec (sic!) shorter load time.

Can you explain how you achieved the 4 second difference using the webserver over the CDN? That seems orders of magnitude faster than I would have expected. I thought you would have been looking at 100ms one way or the other.

At my current client I'm pretty sure that they've got a Raspberry Pi 1 as a proxy server. So all request to outside their network are horribly slow.

Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#52

Post by richmarr »

bartread wrote: post #36
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stop using CDNs for jQuery/js libs, those https connections aren't free - they're much more expensive than just serving the same script from your existing connection Do you have a source for this? My understanding is that, in real usage, it is cheaper to load common libraries from a CDN because in a public CDN (for something like jQuery), the library is likely to already be cached from another website and has a cha…

Using a CDN for common libraries may help, but doesn't always, and is something you should measure rather than just assume. The situation where a CDN actually hurts performance is one I've seen periodically at different clients. When people talk about serving jQuery, or J. Random JavaScript library, from a CDN it means the specific version of jQuery (or whatever) that they're using. There's literally no guarantee tha…

> ... something you should measure rather than just assume

How do people do this?

My obstacle with this point is each CDN would have a different impact in each locale due to the locations of their points of presence, and CDN-ing each resource would a different impact based on the sites that particuar individual had visited.

Measuring it in any useful way in advance of a change would be really hard unless I'm missing a trick, and measuring it in hindsight would require the kind of performance logging that PaaS-level apps don't have access to.

Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#53

Post by keypress »

leeoniya wrote: post #19

but we can already make web pages load 500% faster by not shoveling a ton of shit, not loading scripts from 60 third-party domains (yes stop using CDNs for jQuery/js libs, those https connections aren't free - they're much more expensive than just serving the same script from your existing connection), reducing total requests to 1.22MB embedded youtube players [1], 500kb of other js bloat, 200kb of webfonts, 150kb of…

Back in the day we'd try and get page sizes down to less than 100k.

The Internet isn't fast for everyone. I (in the UK) have no 3G signal, let alone 4G and my broadband speed is pitiful - but it will do. There is nothing I can do to ramp the pipe speed up. I do end up turning off JS and images a lot of the time, because otherwise it ills me.

As a web dev, I don't care for bloat. So I find it particularly irksome, and currently it's enough to deter me from going mobile. Once I'd have dreamed about having a modern smartphone in my pocket with any Internet connection, but the friction currently today puts me off. The UK was recently slammed for its retrograde networks.

Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#54

Post by keypress »

leeoniya wrote: post #47
Ntrails wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1.22MB embedded youtube players A guy who I used to post with wrote a new forum for us all to post on (woo splinter groups). It's pretty cool. One of the things it does is serve a static image of the underlying youtube and then load it on click. When a 'tube might be quoted 7 times on a page - that's a pretty useful trick. I'd just assumed this was a standard forum feature and then I opened a "Music Megathread" on…

yes, you can lazy-load the youtube player, there's also a jquery plugin for it [1]. but this setup requires 2 clicks to play on mobile (because google restricts the player from autoplaying onload in mobile devices due to bandwidth/data-usage concerns). the first click will appear to do nothing as it loads the 1.22MB player, so delivers a crap experience. you're much better off just serving an html5 tag. you can likel…

I'd still prefer a video link, and leave it to my client to negotiate. I have never enjoyed viewing embedded videos in web pages (content aside).

Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#55

Post by icebraining »

yellowbeard wrote: post #34
syphilis2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only slightly related, but I've noticed HN comment pages take a second or two to load when there are many comments (500+). Page sizes are not unreasonable (100-200 kb). What is the cause for these pages loading so slowly? Example 900+ comment page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11116274 Example 2200+ comment page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201

The server is taking a long time to render the response. In the first link, 650ms or so. Open the network tab in your browser developer tools to see the details.

Slashdot's solution to this was to render the HTML on write, instead of on read. Whenever someone posted a new commend, a static HTML file would get generated, so that it could be rapidly served to readers. Movable Type works (can work?) much in the same way, though for blogs.

I know that caching achieves a similar result and is an accepted component of a modern architecture, but I wonder if we wouldn't be better served by implementing these sort of "upfront caches" in more software.

Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#56

Post by leeoniya »

richmarr wrote: post #52
bartread wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a CDN for common libraries may help, but doesn't always, and is something you should measure rather than just assume. The situation where a CDN actually hurts performance is one I've seen periodically at different clients. When people talk about serving jQuery, or J. Random JavaScript library, from a CDN it means the specific version of jQuery (or whatever) that they're using. There's literally no guarantee tha…

> ... something you should measure rather than just assume How do people do this? My obstacle with this point is each CDN would have a different impact in each locale due to the locations of their points of presence, and CDN-ing each resource would a different impact based on the sites that particuar individual had visited. Measuring it in any useful way in advance of a change would be really hard unless I'm missing…

my recommendation is to first serve everything yourself over TLS (minified, bundled, gzipped). if you can, run HTTP2. then measure.

if this does not deliver the perf you expect (chances are that it will), then look into CDNs.

if you need to serve media that needs a lot of bandwidth (expensive) then look into CDNs.

if you need some form of real-time comm like WebSockets or WebRTC that actually requires low latency, look into distributed systems (amazon, google, azure, cloudflare?, etc..)

Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#57

Post by tombrossman »

richmarr wrote: post #52
bartread wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a CDN for common libraries may help, but doesn't always, and is something you should measure rather than just assume. The situation where a CDN actually hurts performance is one I've seen periodically at different clients. When people talk about serving jQuery, or J. Random JavaScript library, from a CDN it means the specific version of jQuery (or whatever) that they're using. There's literally no guarantee tha…

> ... something you should measure rather than just assume How do people do this? My obstacle with this point is each CDN would have a different impact in each locale due to the locations of their points of presence, and CDN-ing each resource would a different impact based on the sites that particuar individual had visited. Measuring it in any useful way in advance of a change would be really hard unless I'm missing…

This would be extremely useful data to have and when I last looked I found little to go on. For example, how great would it be to have an extra column on a page like this with cache hit rates? https://cdnjs.com/libraries

Nice to have these free hosted assets, but I suspect that a lot of these are an additional download and not actually cached by the majority of visitors. Just having a rough estimate would be helpful when choosing whether to directly serve an asset or use a CDN.

Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#58

Post by dchest »

andrewguenther wrote: post #33
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stop using CDNs for jQuery/js libs, those https connections aren't free - they're much more expensive than just serving the same script from your existing connection Do you have a source for this? My understanding is that, in real usage, it is cheaper to load common libraries from a CDN because in a public CDN (for something like jQuery), the library is likely to already be cached from another website and has a cha…

jQuery was a poor example in the original comment. You almost 100% have jQuery cached if you're getting it from CDN. But this only works for extremely widely used libraries (jQuery, Bootstrap, etc.). It drives me nuts when I see tiny little libraries in Github bragging about being on a CDN. They just don't have the usage for it to be efficient.

Which of the following versions are cached?

3.1.1, 3.1.0, 3.0.0, 2.2.4, 2.2.3, 2.2.2, 2.2.1, 2.2.0, 2.1.4, 2.1.3, 2.1.1, 2.1.0, 2.0.3, 2.0.2, 2.0.1, 2.0.0, 1.12.4, 1.12.3, 1.12.2, 1.12.1, 1.12.0, 1.11.3, 1.11.2, 1.11.1, 1.11.0, 1.10.2, 1.10.1, 1.10.0, 1.9.1, 1.9.0, 1.8.3, 1.8.2, 1.8.1, 1.8.0, 1.7.2, 1.7.1, 1.7.0, 1.6.4, 1.6.3, 1.6.2, 1.6.1, 1.6.0, 1.5.2, 1.5.1, 1.5.0, 1.4.4, 1.4.3, 1.4.2, 1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.3.0, 1.2.6, 1.2.3

from which of the following providers:

- https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/

- https://code.jquery.com/

- https://cdnjs.com/

- https://www.asp.net/ajax/cdn

- ...

Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#59

Post by jiehong »

leeoniya wrote: post #19

but we can already make web pages load 500% faster by not shoveling a ton of shit, not loading scripts from 60 third-party domains (yes stop using CDNs for jQuery/js libs, those https connections aren't free - they're much more expensive than just serving the same script from your existing connection), reducing total requests to 1.22MB embedded youtube players [1], 500kb of other js bloat, 200kb of webfonts, 150kb of…

It's more general than just webpages, but applies to everything under the name “Jevon's Paradox”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons%27s_paradox).

Basically: more power -> more resources can be analysed in the same time, and not faster to answer.

Re: System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively

#60

Post by roryisok »

leeoniya wrote: post #19

but we can already make web pages load 500% faster by not shoveling a ton of shit, not loading scripts from 60 third-party domains (yes stop using CDNs for jQuery/js libs, those https connections aren't free - they're much more expensive than just serving the same script from your existing connection), reducing total requests to 1.22MB embedded youtube players [1], 500kb of other js bloat, 200kb of webfonts, 150kb of…

> literally cannot consume the internet without uMatrix & uBlock Origin

hear hear. and on mobile, its painful because I can't have those (windows phone at least). planning on buying a DD-WRT compatible router soon so I can do some kind of router level ad-blocking and let me browse on the phone again

PS: opera mobile for android has a built in adblocker

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