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A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

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Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#61

Post by qayxc »

timeon wrote: post #35
qayxc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure there are more resource-heavy places but I think the problem is general approach. Neglecting of performance and overall approach to resources brought us to these resource-heavy tools. It seems just dismissive when people pointing to places where there could be made more cuts and call it a day. If we want to really fix places with bigger impact we need to change this approach in a first place.

Sure thing, but's not low-hanging fruit. The impact is so miniscule that the effort required is too high when compared to the benefit.

This is micro-optimisation for a valid use case (slow connections in bandwidth-starved situations), but in the real world, a single hi-res image, short video clip, or audio sample would negate all your text-squeezing, HTTP header optimisation games, and struggle for minimalism.

So for the vast majority of use cases it's simply irrelevant. And no, your website is likely not going to get 1,000,000 unique visitors per hour so you'd have a hard time even measuring the impact whereas simply NOT ordering pizza and having a home made salad instead would have a measurable impact orders of magnitude greater.

Estimating the overall impact of your actions and non-actions is hard, but it's easier and more practical to optimise your assets, remove bloat (no megabytes of JS frameworks), and think about whether you really need that annoying full-screen video background. THOSE are low-hanging fruit with lots of impact. Trying to trim down a functional site to <14kB is NOT.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#62

Post by ajsnigrutin »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #55
simgt wrote: post #10

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…

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 prett…

Now open an average news site, with 100s of request, tens of ads, autoplaying video ads, tracking pixels, etc., using gigabytes of ram and a lot of cpu.

Then multiply that by the number of daily visitors.

Without "hamburgers" (food in general), we die, reducing the size of usesless content on websites doesn't really hurt anyone.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#63

Post by spacephysics »

simgt wrote: post #10

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…

This is one of those things that is high effort, low impact. Similar to recycling in some cities/towns where it just gets dumped in a landfill.

Instead we should be looking to nuclear power solutions for our energy needs, and not waste time with reducing website size if its purely a function of environmental impact.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#64

Post by achenet »

andrepd wrote: post #22
9dev wrote: post #7

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.

> a corporation large enough will have a team of experienced SREs that know over which detail to obsess. Ahh, if only. Have you seen applications developed by large corporations lately? :)

a corporation large enough to have a team of experienced SREs that know which details to obsess over will also have enough promotion-hungry POs and middle managers to tell them devs to add 50MB of ads and trackers in the web page. Maybe another 100MB for an LLM wrapper too.

:)

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#65

Post by nasso_dev »

9dev wrote: post #7

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.

I agree, it feels like it should be how you describe it.

But if Evan Wallace didn't obsess over performance when building Figma, it wouldn't be what it is today. Sometimes, performance is a feature.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#66

Post by DuncanCoffee »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #14
Hamuko wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently used an electric car charger where the charger is controlled by a mobile app that's basically a thin wrapper over a website. Unfortunately I only had a 0.25 Mb/s Internet plan at the time and it took me several minutes just staring at the splash screen as it was downloading JavaScript and other assets. Even when I got it to load, it hadn't managed to download all fonts. Truly an eye-opening experience.

Why can't we just pay with a payment card at electric chargers? Drives me insane.

It wasn't required by law and the ocpp charging protocol, used to manage charge sessions at a high level between the charger and the service provider (not the vehicle) did not include payments management. Everybody just found it easier to manage payments using apps and credits. But I think Europe is going to make it mandatory soon(ish)

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#67

Post by vouaobrasil »

jychang wrote: post #56
vouaobrasil wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

I sort of agree...but not really, because you'll never get a situation where a million people can vote on a specific law about making YT more efficient. One needs to muster some sort of general political will to even get that to be an issue, and that takes a lot more than a million people.

Personally, if a referendum were held tomorrow to disband Google, I would vote yes for that...but good luck getting that referendum to be held.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#68

Post by molszanski »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #46
FlyingAvatar wrote: post #33

Earlier 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.

If you turn this into open problem, without hypothetical limits of what an frontend engineer ca do it would become more interesting and more impactful in real life. That said engineer is human being who could use that time in myriad other ways that would be more productive to helping the environment

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)

#69

Post by SXX »

elmigranto wrote: post #31
9dev wrote: post #7

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.

This. It's exactly why Microsoft use modern frameworks such as React Native for their Start Menu used by billions of people every day.
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