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Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

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Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#61

Post by torginus »

extraisland wrote: post #29
torginus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - it's often engineering's fault. It's been pretty consistent that a decently specced server, running PHP that was written sometime last century, generating static pages, redis cache in front, and serving static content via nginx, beats the everloving pants off whatever fotm microservice SPA monstrosity modern devs tend to come up with. The most hilarious if you go to pirate sites (for stuff like comics, m…

A lot of companies seem to architect their web apps to deal with millions of users. When in reality they may have a couple of hundred hitting the site at once. This explodes the cost of development and it makes current web development miserable IME. I am forced to deal with everything being totally overengineered when a Flask app with a PostgresSQL backend could probably do the job on a reasonably priced VPS.

I used to work at a boring mid-sized finance-y company a while ago. Our stack was full Microsoft - IIS,ASP.NET,MS SQL, plus some appliance doing load balancing/API throttling stuff (not sure, not a sysadmin guy). The whole thing fit in a closet, handled 10k+ requests day and night.

All our code was basically - check user auth - do some stuff with the db/perhaps call out to some external service - serve request.

I never saw a single request above 50ms, with most being way less. Nobody ever talked about performance.

Then I moved to a fancy startup. EKS, nodejs servers, microservices of every denomination, GraphQL, every fashionable piece of tech cca 2018. I realized node was shockingly slow, and single threaded to boot, all that overhead added up to requests with a median latency of about 200ms, with the 99% latency measured in seconds.

Performance engineering was front and center, with dashboards, entire sprints dedicated to optimization, potential optimizations constantly considered, adding fake data and suspense to our React frontend, to hide latency etc. It was insane.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#62

Post by azangru »

threetonesun wrote: post #41
azangru wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I totally disagree with his conclusion that companies want their website to be faster But what do web developers want? What do web designers want? Some developers pride themselved on being craftsmen. They would write tests. They would design architectures. Why wouldn't they want websites they are building to be faster?

As a web developer who also uses web sites I care less about speed than I do usability. Most of the time I'm on a 1Gbps+ connection, all I want is your site flows to make sense and any actions I take to be reliable and clearly handle errors. For things that are truly critical I want 99% of my UI to be precached by a native application, so we're only talking in data (and yes, keep that data small). There are lots of g…

> As a web developer who also uses web sites I care less about speed than I do usability. Most of the time I'm on a 1Gbps+ connection

Sure, I get it. The same argument can be applied to web accessibility. Most frontend developers are young and healthy. Should they care about accessibility of the sites they build?

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#63

Post by extraisland »

azangru wrote: post #60
extraisland wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Management doesn't care about it being crafted nicely. They want a ROI. Often it isn't easy for them to see the benefit of something being more performant, or looking better. It doesn't matter to them as often they won't ever use these systems. It just needs to function acceptably. A huge number of places are not data-driven. Therefore it is difficult to show in anyway that improving service speed will improve ROI. S…

Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance? > I've totally given up with it and I've can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career. Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money.

> Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance?

I've just explained why. What part didn't you understand?

> Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money

I do (I like to know my code works). That doesn't mean other people will.

Much like site performance unless there is an emphasis on quality, then many developers won't bother writing tests.

I've had people copy and paste tests, then jig the code around so they got the green tick in the IDE. The feature didn't work at all. The test was complete nonsense. I have colleagues that put up PRs where the code doesn't even compile.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#64

Post by graemep »

bluGill wrote: post #52
mlinhares wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Businesses do hire people qualified for the job in general. However they have lots of different jobs with different qualifications needed and so they have lots of different qualifications in play. I'm not an accountant so if I do something that negatively affects accountants I won't find out - unless what I do shows up in an audit. My company has put things in place so that it is unlikely I would accidentally do some…

I think part of the reason is that management usually know enough about accounting that they know enough to hire the right people, ask the experts in the area the right questions, and ensure someone implements best practices.

> if I tried to send my brother in law a million dollars I doubt I could do that (not that I would)

If you did it would almost certainly be noticed and you would face consequences. That is why something more complex than just a transfer (very often something very elaborate) is required for fraud.

Then again everyone accepts you need to do things to stop fraud, that the trade offs (things taking more time and effort, not being able to do somethings) from the necessary precautions.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#65

Post by mlinhares »

bluGill wrote: post #52
mlinhares wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Businesses do hire people qualified for the job in general. However they have lots of different jobs with different qualifications needed and so they have lots of different qualifications in play. I'm not an accountant so if I do something that negatively affects accountants I won't find out - unless what I do shows up in an audit. My company has put things in place so that it is unlikely I would accidentally do some…

Metrics, you have to track both network latency for all critical calls and page load times from multiple devices. There are multiple services out there that let you track this information.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#66

Post by fridder »

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…

It used to matter a bit more, or at least the initial page load speed did.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#67

Post by graemep »

lesuorac wrote: post #36
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.

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.

You have more users, hopefully more revenue, and a problem that can be solved by throwing connectivity and hardware at it - and you have already probably reduced your spend on one or both in making the site faster.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#68

Post by game_the0ry »

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.

True if you work at non-technical company, like a bank.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#69

Post by StopVibeCoding »

jpdb wrote: post #56

Web performance is probably/mostly valued as efficiently as it needs to be. The numbers mentioned in the article are...quite egregious. > Oh, Just 2.4 Megabytes. Out of a chonky 4 MB payload. Assuming they could rebuild the site to hit Alex Russell's target of 450 KB, that's conservatively $435,000,000 per year. Not too bad. And this is likely a profound underestimation of the real gain This is not a "profound undere…

it's not just their direct cost, it's also the loss of revenue. the author wasn't arguing that they could save 435 million dollars in server costs.

Instead they were arguing that in addition to saving maybe a million or two in server costs, they would gain an additional 435 million dollars in revenue because less people would leave their website

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#70

Post by ozgrakkurt »

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…

Bean counter logic example A.

The articles fault is trying to appeal to this logic at all.

Reality is you don’t know how to estimate this, I don’t know either and I doubt anyone really knows.

This kind of logic is used to push things in the direction that the person wants, it really doesn’t seem genuine

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