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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)

#91
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant. Are you seriously telling me now that if my website is 256k or 1024k I'm responsible for destroying the planet? Take it out on your masters. And no, reducing resource use to the minimum in the name of sustainability does not scale down the same way it scales up. You're just pushing the idea that all human…

> the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant Whataboutism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism > You're just pushing the idea that all human activity is some sort of disease that's best disposed of. That's essentially just wishing the worst on your own species for being successful. Strawmaning. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man Every blo…

> the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant

(this was actually stated in agreement with the original poster, who you clearly misunderstood, so there's no "what-about" involved here. They were condemning all kinds of consumption, including the frivolous ones I mentioned).

But

I'm afraid you've missed both my small point and my wider point.

My small point was to argue against the parent's comment that

>>reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future

I disagree with this concept on the basis that nothing can be accomplished on a large scale if the primary concern is simply to reduce resource consumption to a minimum. If you care to disagree with that, then please address it.

The larger point was that this theory leads inexorably to the idea that humans should just kill themselves or disappear; and it almost always comes from people who themselves want to kill themselves or disappear.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now go to an average McDonalds, with hundreds of orders, automatically added value meals, customer rewards, etc. consuming thousands of cows and a lot of pastureland. Then multiply that by the number of daily customers. Without web pages (information in general), we return to the Dark Ages. Reducing the number of hamburgers people eat doesn't really hurt anyone.

Sure, but you've got to eat something.

Now, if mcdonalds padded 5kB of calories of a cheesburger with 10.000 kilobytes of calories in wasted food like news sites doo, it would be a different story. The ratio would be 200 kilos of wasted food for 100grams of usable beef.

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

#93
post #85

How relevant is this now, if you have a modern server that supports HTTP/3? HTTP/3 uses UDP rather than TCP, so TCP slow start should not apply at all.

As per the article, QUIC (transport protocol underneath HTTP/3) uses slow start as well. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/id/draft-ietf-quic-recovery...

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

#94
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…

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.

Talking about video streaming, I have a question for big tech companies: Why? Why are we still talking about optimising HTML, CSS and JS in 2025? This is tech from 35 years ago. Why can't browsers adopt a system like video streaming, where you "stream" a binary of your site? The server could publish a link to the uncompressed source so anyone can inspect it, keeping the spirit of the open web alive. Do you realise how many years web developers have spent obsessing over this document-based legacy system and how to improve its performance? Not just years, their whole careers! How many cool technologies were created in the last 35 years? I lost count. Honestly, why are big tech companies still building on top of a legacy system, forcing web developers to waste their time on things like performance tweaks instead of focusing on what actually matters: the product.

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

#95
post #74

I just checked my home page [1] and it has a compressed transfer size of 7.0 kB. / 2.7 kB main.css 2.5 kB favicon.png 1.8 kB ------------------- Total 7.0 kB Not bad, I think! I generate the blog listing on the home page (as well as the rest of my website) with my own static site generator, written in Common Lisp [2]. On a limited number of mathematical posts [3], I use KaTeX with client-side rendering. On such pages…

> That said, I do use KaTeX with client-side rendering on a limited number of pages that have mathematical content

You could try replacing KaTeX with MathML: https://w3c.github.io/mathml-core/

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

#96
post #89
post #85

How relevant is this now, if you have a modern server that supports HTTP/3? HTTP/3 uses UDP rather than TCP, so TCP slow start should not apply at all.

> How relevant is this now Very relevant. A lot of websites need 5 to 30 seconds or more to load.

I have a suspicion that the 30 second loading time is not caused by TCP slow start.

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

#97
post #94

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.

Talking about video streaming, I have a question for big tech companies: Why? Why are we still talking about optimising HTML, CSS and JS in 2025? This is tech from 35 years ago. Why can't browsers adopt a system like video streaming, where you "stream" a binary of your site? The server could publish a link to the uncompressed source so anyone can inspect it, keeping the spirit of the open web alive. Do you realise ho…

That’s already how it works.

The binary is a compressed artefact and the stream is a TLS pipe. But the principle is the same.

In fact videos streams over the web are actually based on how HTTP documents are chunked and retrieved, rather than the other way around.

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

#98
post #94

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.

Talking about video streaming, I have a question for big tech companies: Why? Why are we still talking about optimising HTML, CSS and JS in 2025? This is tech from 35 years ago. Why can't browsers adopt a system like video streaming, where you "stream" a binary of your site? The server could publish a link to the uncompressed source so anyone can inspect it, keeping the spirit of the open web alive. Do you realise ho…

1. How does that help not wasting resources? It needs more energy and traffic

2. Everything in our world is dwarfes standing on the shoulders of giants. To rip everything up and create something completely new is most of the time an idea that sounds better than it really would be. Anyone who thinks something else is mostly to young to see this pattern.

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

#99
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…

You'll find that people "stop caring" about just about anything when it starts to impact them. Personally, I agree with your statement.

Since a main argument is seemingly that AI is worse, let's remember that AI is querying these huge pages as well.

Also that the 14kb size is less than 1% of the current average mobile website payload.

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

#100

Damn... I'm at 17.2KB for my home page! (not including dependencies) FWIW I optimised the heck out of my personal homepage and got 100/100 for all Lighthouse scores. Which I had not previously thought possible LOL Built in Rails too! It's absolutely worth optimising your site though. It just is such a pleasing experience when a page loads without any perceptible lag!

rails has nothing to do with the rendered page size though. Congrats on the perfect lighthouse score.

Doesn't Rails asset pipeline have an effect on the page size, like if Propshaft being used instead of Sprockets. From what I remember, Propshaft intentionally does not include minification or compression.
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