If you care about reducing the amount of back and forth then just use QUIC.
A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
51–60 of 324 posts
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
#52Aside 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…
Or we can just commit to building out solar infrastructure and not worry about this rounding error anymore
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
#53And now try to load the same website over HTTPS
I know some people who are experimenting with using shorter certificates, i.e. shorter certificate chains, to reduce traffic. If you're a large enough site, then you can save a ton of traffic every day.
Please though, for the love of dog, have your site serve a complete chain and don't have the browser or software stack do AIA chasing.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
#54Has this theory been tested?
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
#55Aside 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…
Do we? Let's compare some numbers.
Creating an average hamburger requires an input of 2-6 kWh of energy, from start to finish. At 15¢ USD/kWh, this gives us an upper limit of about 90¢ of electricity.
The average 14 kB web page takes about 0.000002 kWh to serve. You would need to serve that web page about 1-300,000 times to create the same energy demands of a single hamburger. A 14 mB web page, which would be a pretty heavy JavaScript app these days, would need about 1 to 3,000.
I think those are pretty good ways to use the energy.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is that a lot of people DO have their own websites for which they have some control over. So it's not like a million people optimizing their own websites will have any control over what Google does with YouTube for instance...
A million people is a very strong political force.
A million determined voters can easily force laws to be made which forces youtube to be more efficient.
I often think about how orthodoxical all humans are. We never think about different paths outside of social norms.
- Modern western society has weakened support for mass action to the point where it is literally an unfathomable "black swan" perspective in public discourse.
- Spending a few million dollars on TV ads to get someone elected is a lot cheaper than whatever Bill Gates spends on NGOs, and for all the money he spent it seems like aid is getting cut off.
- Hiring or acting as a hitman to kill someone to achieve your goal is a lot cheaper than the other options above. It seems like this concept, for better or worse, is not quite in the public consciousness currently. The 1960s 1970s era of assassinations have truly gone and past.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters. Is it? My front end engineer spending 90 minutes cutting dependencies out of the site isn’t going to deny YouTube the opportunity to improve their streaming algorithms.
It might do the opposite. We need to teach engineers of all stripes how to analyse and fix performance problems if we’re going to do anything about them.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
#58Aside 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.
> 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.
Is it really? I was surprised to see that surfing newspaper websites or Facebook produces more traffic per time than Netflix or Youtube. Of course there's a lot of embedded video in ads and it could maybe count as streaming video.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineering-wise, it sometimes isn't. But it does send a signal that can also become a trend in society to be more respectful of our energy usage. Sometimes, it does make sense to focus on the most visible aspect of energy usage, rather than the most intensive. Just by making your website smaller and being vocal about it, you could reach 100,000 people if you get a lot of visitors, whereas Google isn't going to give…
I'd be 100% on board with you if you were able to show me a single - just a single - regular website user who'd care about energy usage of a first(!) site load. I'm honestly just really annoyed about this "society and environment"-spin on advise that would have an otherwise niche, but perfectly valid reason behind it (TFA: slow satellite network on the high seas). This might sound harsh and I don't mean it personally…
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Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineering-wise, it sometimes isn't. But it does send a signal that can also become a trend in society to be more respectful of our energy usage. Sometimes, it does make sense to focus on the most visible aspect of energy usage, rather than the most intensive. Just by making your website smaller and being vocal about it, you could reach 100,000 people if you get a lot of visitors, whereas Google isn't going to give…
I'd be 100% on board with you if you were able to show me a single - just a single - regular website user who'd care about energy usage of a first(!) site load. I'm honestly just really annoyed about this "society and environment"-spin on advise that would have an otherwise niche, but perfectly valid reason behind it (TFA: slow satellite network on the high seas). This might sound harsh and I don't mean it personally…
Perhaps you are right. But I do remember one guy who had a YouTube channel and he uploaded fairly low-quality videos at a reduced framerate to achieve a high level of compression, and he explicitly put in his video that he did it to save energy.
Now, it is true that it didn't save much because probably many people were uploaded 8K videos at the time, so drop in the bucket. But personally, I found it quite inspiring and his decision was instrumental in my deciding to never upload 4K. And in general, I will say that people like that do inspire me and keep me going to be as minimal as possible when I use energy in all domains.
For me at least, trying to optimize for using as little energy as possible isn't an engineering problem. It's a challenge to do it uniformly as much as possible, so it can't be subdivided. And I do think every little bit counts, and if I can spend time making my website smaller, I'll do that in case one person gets inspired by that. It's not like I'm a machine and my only goal is time efficiency....