Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
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Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
1–10 of 83 posts
Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
#2It is not undervalued, it is just priced.
The author does not seem to understand the concept of premature optimization.
Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
#3I agree that the problem is product development, but the framing is wrong. Engineers generally have a solid intuition for what will perform well, but when UX designers and PMs with only a vague idea of how these technologies work dreams up an idea, gives a deadline, then the engineers are evaluated on fulfilling those metrics, then the outcome will be obvious.
Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
#4It is not undervalued, it is just priced. The author does not seem to understand the concept of premature optimization.
What do you mean by priced? And how did you come to the conclusion that that concept is alien to the author? Do you mean to tell that premature optimization by itself explains sluggishness of websites? I think you could be a bit more clear in your comment.
Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
#5It is not undervalued, it is just priced. The author does not seem to understand the concept of premature optimization.
Well, in case of web technologies is in general price of any user facing optimization... Which these companies do not want to pay.
Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
#6It is not undervalued, it is just priced. The author does not seem to understand the concept of premature optimization.
I have gigabit internet at home, and am in Australia for a month.
It isn't premature. It's very much needed.
Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
#7I agree that the problem is product development, but the framing is wrong. Engineers generally have a solid intuition for what will perform well, but when UX designers and PMs with only a vague idea of how these technologies work dreams up an idea, gives a deadline, then the engineers are evaluated on fulfilling those metrics, then the outcome will be obvious.
And don’t forget that once the engineers are done, a nice thick layer of analytics junk is slathered on, plus whatever layer that allows marketing/sales to make arbitrary changes at will without code. By the time you’re done with all that even the best engineered web app has become a behemoth.
There’s are a few cases where the engineering side isn’t helping things though, like how the Spotify desktop app loads a full redundant set of JS dependencies for each pane since they’re each independent iframes, which they do so the teams responsible for the panes never have to interact.
Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
#8I agree that the problem is product development, but the framing is wrong. Engineers generally have a solid intuition for what will perform well, but when UX designers and PMs with only a vague idea of how these technologies work dreams up an idea, gives a deadline, then the engineers are evaluated on fulfilling those metrics, then the outcome will be obvious.
Totally agree. I did a lot of work with an eCom site (a big one; you probably see their brand name daily) for about 5 years and latency mattered a lot to them. Any extra latency was deadly, and they freaked out about latency going up by 100ms.
So then you load their site - unbelievable garbage, tons of pop-up ads for promos, video frames all over the place, high res graphics, megabytes of javascript.
The backend just as messy, with dozens and dozens of layers that made the latency budget by the time you reached the database backend super slim. Think: orders dropping when database request latency hit 10ms at the 99th percentile.
Insanity.
Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
#9Some anecdata for you: I used to work for a price comparison website. We had pretty good metrics on how long pages took to load and what the drop-off from page to page of the process was. It will shock you not in the least that milliseconds translates into percentages lost pretty quickly. Speed up your sign up process and that is money in the bank.
Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?
#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 even though I do not believe, even for a second, this actually costs Kroger $435M a year.