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> Performance matters. It took 8.4 seconds to load the Reddit front page on my phone. Hacker News took 1.1 seconds. This feels like advice from the overweight

> Performance matters. It took 8.4 seconds to load the Reddit front page on my phone. Hacker News took 1.1 seconds. This feels like advice from the overweight gym teacher on how to do pushups. The desktop Reddit site took 2.2 seconds over the same connection, by the way. It seems like it would be much more valuable to optimize whatever is taking up >75% of page time on mobile.

dsp1234 10y ago
Another point of data, on mobile, navigating to reddit.com: T 0: white page T 5: to see the reddit header with logo, the rest of the page is still white T 16: to see the bar stating that I should use the app, click on the tiny mobile site link T 25: page visible behind the "app" bar stating I should use the app T 32: the bar is gone, and the site is "usable"
disiplus 10y ago
reddit has i.reddit.com (old mobile page) that is faster then the new one. i hope they dont turn that off because i use it sometimes. the new one is just slow.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
  I use this too. It's also better UX in my opinion. In the new site, a lot of the buttons are either hard to see or too small to reliably hit with the finger on the first try.
  - yoodenvranx 10y ago
    I am glad to see that I am not alone with my preference of the old mobile site. It fast, simple and it does not have any unnecessary whitespace and padding which just waste valuable space.
    - Laforet 10y ago
      The new mobile site is slkw fails in basic functions such as as preventing double posting - which happens all the time because the UI is often irresponsive.
- zumu 10y ago
  I suspect it may just 'feel' slow, because it hides all the content from you until the fetch requests finish.
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    If it 'feels' slow, that seems functionally worse than actually being slow. It implies an unresponsive site where it could be faster. A slower site, that 'feels' faster, is more functional to any human. So to echo about half these posts, it seems to be UI/UX holding it back.
hacker_9 10y ago
Beyond performance, the entire reddit mobile experience is terrible anyway. It's advised to use the unofficial 'reddit is fun' app which is simply amazing in comparison.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  I use Relay for Reddit. It's the best mobile app I've ever used, and only the second one I've ever actually paid for, there's also a free version which I used for a long time which puts ads at the bottom. The interface is great. You can swipe for (almost) everything, which makes it easy to use one-handed.
- Nition 10y ago
  If anyone here uses Sailfish or MeeGo, the Quickddit app for Reddit is excellent. It's on the Jolla store but it's also on GitHub: https://github.com/accumulator/Quickddit https://github.com/accumulator/Quickddit
forgotmypw 10y ago
I'm a long-time Reddit user (10+ years on my oldest account) and a mod of several subs, including a 50K+. It is with great sadness that I say this, but Reddit is rapidly moving in the direction of pulling a Digg v4. They just released for beta a new mod-mail that is unusable, so I'm guessing this new trendy but shitty design will eventually replace the whole site. I don't know what will happen after that, but I won't stick around to see it.
- overcast 10y ago
  Combine that with the toxic people inhabiting every popular sub reddit, it's some place I unfortunately no longer visit.
  - grey-area 10y ago
    Reddit is an interesting phenomenon. The home page has been a toxic mix of memes and trash for much of its life (I looked at it a few times, but don't go there any more). The subreddits vary from highly toxic to well moderated (spacex for example), but most are so lightly moderated that they have some good links but little interesting comment content. The contrast with HN is interesting - I think the moderation here is much better and the culture is more welcoming as a result, but the home page here now just goes past too fast for it to function as a firehose on specific subjects.
    - ppod 10y ago
      HN is just more niche. HN is 842 on US alexa. Reddit is 7. The criticism that reddit gets is so naive. What other site of comparable size, where the users are mostly anonymous, has better community? Compare reddit comments with comment threads on youtube or national newspaper sites, and re-calibrate your humanity baseline.
      - hueving 10y ago
        >The criticism that reddit gets is so naive It's perfectly valid to criticize something for sucking even if there isn't a better alternative.
Klathmon 10y ago
For starters, that's not really on-topic here as this is a post about the server side's caching, having nothing to do really with any client issues. But regardless, what does the second page load take? What does the 3rd take? For many people, they go on reddit and stay on there for a significant amount of time. So that first page load is much less impactful, especially if it can enable them to have faster "pageloads" while on the site. If the site is optimized for them, then having the image/text post load in a fraction of a second, and the comments in under a second (which it does for me) seems like a good bet. That being said, they really could spend some time reducing that impact. And just to throw my experience in with the others, I'm getting much faster load times. Timed using the chrome dev tools connected to my phone, it takes 2.76 seconds to the "load" event and about 3 seconds until it's fully usable. (cache disabled, 4g tmobile network, high-end android phone, obviously these will be much worse on slower phones, slower networks, etc...)
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  It's bad enough it takes several seconds of loading on my iPhone when the desktop version is near instant, it's utterly broken too. Most menus don't open for me on the first try (especially in landscape) or open in the wrong place with touch targets that are "off" so I have to rotate the phone a few times. The old iOS 6 style site didn't age well visually, but it sure was fast. I miss the days when mobile sites were the fast and light version meant to work over 2G. To me it's insane a non-SPA desktop site would become a SPA mobile site
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    > To me it's insane a non-SPA desktop site would become a SPA mobile site Not to me. Yes, you might pay additional time on the first load, but you save massive amounts of data (and thus, due to TCP, highly latency bound packets) when you just transfer small bytes of JSON. Oh, and that saves battery too - mobile data transfer is the hugest drain on any phone's battery.
    - BoorishBears 10y ago
jcdavis 10y ago
On my iphone 5 (yes I realize thats old), the mobile website straight up doesn't load at all, just a blank white screen. I wonder how much device testing they've done...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Same on my iPhone 6s. It started happening with the iOS 10 beta, not sure if that was a coincidence...
user5994461 10y ago
> This feels like advice from the overweight gym teacher on how to do pushups. General guidelines: Always doubt advice from startup folks. Usually the more unicorn and hype they are, the less qualified they actually are. Basically, they grow by recruiting a lot of people (most inexperienced in average) and grow in all directions without a plan. To caricature, it's like a big playground.
senorjazz 10y ago
maybe the additional time is to serve the full page notice "DO YOU WANT TO USE THE APP" which they insist (for me anyway) on every single page I load.
akjainaj 10y ago
That website is very heavy on JS, that's why it's unbearably slow. I remember having to use it on a mobile with 512MB of RAM once, it literally killed my browser (probably the OOM killer)
olegkikin 10y ago
HN is a much much much simpler website, and has orders of magnitude less traffic. From what I heard, Reddit is on a pretty tight budget, and it's a pretty small team as well.
- revelation 10y ago
  We don't measure complexity for complexity sake, we look at the functionality offered. The fact that HN is a much much much simpler website while doing much of the same functionality is an indictment of the complexity of the Reddit mobile site. Traffic doesn't really enter into it, that is really not the limiting factor here. They just spent the past year relaunching "reddit - the startup" so their team is now plenty big, they just don't have much to show for it.
  - olegkikin 10y ago
    > while doing much of the same functionality That's just not true. Reddit has a ton of extra functionality, including creation of subs, subscription to subs, controls of voting rules, user bots that run on reddit's servers (example: RemindMe), theming, tons of settings even for the regular users, moderators/admins interfaces, apps (example: ChangeTip), reply notifications, self-serving ad management system, image/video embeds. I'm sure there's a lot more, these are just the obvious features that HN doesn't have.
    - mintplant 10y ago
      > user bots that run on reddit's servers (example: RemindMe), RemindMeBot runs on its creator's own server and communicates through reddit's API as if it were a regular user. AutoModerator is the only bot I know of that runs on reddit's servers.
  - dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y ago
    > while doing much of the same functionality If that were true, this would be a much better site.
positr0n 10y ago
Here's an awesome performance audit of reddit mobile by Paul Irish. It shows how completely unoptimized the code was back in 2015. Sadly it doesn't seem to have improved much since then. https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247 https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247
- gooeyblob 10y ago
  The entire codebase for reddit-mobile was rewritten. https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/compare/e3f1119e3358da7d3c56b22cc3c6c455942a9bc0...f5ba9955eb3712a44cca55bf4d98fe56c4f20e12 https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/compare/e3f1119e3358...
  - zumu 10y ago
    Did the rewrite coincide with the re-skinning of the UI? Because any gains in performance are imperceptible, as the UI now hides all content until the browser has completely finished fetching. So even if it is 'faster' the UX is actually 'slower'. I
- curioussavage 10y ago
  The site was in beta at the time so yes no performance work had been done. The rewrite last year improved things and we are working on more performance improvements.
sharmanaetor 10y ago
Reddit has a bunch of images on the home page. HN is all text. Also as noted by others, Reddit is much more popular.
sean_patel 10y ago
> It took 8.4 seconds to load the Reddit front page on my phone. Hacker News took 1.1 seconds. How could you compare the 2? The former has images and rich media. The latter is all text, like a unix terminal. LOL
- ec109685 10y ago
  So do the non rich media parts of the page load in 1.1 seconds?
  - sean_patel 10y ago
    Don't take it personally. You were trying to compare apples with mangoes.
panic 10y ago
Remember the HN thread for the presidential election? A single huge thread affected the server so much it had to be split up. Reddit has hundreds of threads that big.
- diziet 10y ago
  Well, Reddit has one or two order of magnitude more of server infrastructure and full time engineers working on their product than HN.
yoodenvranx 10y ago
> It took 8.4 seconds to load the Reddit front page on my phone. The new mobile version is a complete pile of junk! Use the old one by adding '.compact' to a normal reddit link, it's better in almost every aspect.
raldi 10y ago
HN serves the same front page to all users, other than the bar at the top. To make a reddit front page, you have to look up the hottest results of ~100 subreddits and shuffle them all together in the correct order. Literally every time a vote is cast, that could change the front page for every single user, in a different way for each one.
- swsieber 10y ago
  False. It cannot since it has too look up the vote status for (logged in users).
  - choward 10y ago
    What?
  - flashman 10y ago
    I dunno man, I think I'm going to trust the former Reddit admin (/u/raldi)
    - Strom 10y ago
      Blind trust in such a simply verifiable case is quite naive. You can easily open up the front page of HN as a logged in user and see that it contains information about which storeies you've voted for and which you've flagged. On top of that, you can click "hide" to hide stories. These will only be hidden for your specific account, not for every person who loads the front page. What's more, the go-to call-to-action by HN admins during really popular stories is to have people log out, because logged in users don't get cached results. Have a look at the comment by HN admin dang on the Trump winning story. [1] The key part being "please log out to read HN today, unless you want to comment. Then we can serve you from cache". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
      - justinlaster 10y ago
        That's not the same thing as showing different results per user. It's just tacking on the user's operations when it renders out the front page. They're two completely different operations, with completely different complexities behind them. The "hide" feature is not analogous to what reddit is doing.
slavik81 10y ago
Another test for the skeptical. I logged out of reddit and tried loading /r/programming. That subreddit has no image submissions and no obvious customization. I loaded it once, then loaded it again while timing it. It took 6.5 seconds. This was over a different connection, so I tried HN again. It took 1.0 seconds.
- Laforet 10y ago
  Have you tried looking at different page elements and see which ones took longer? I've always felt that the main reddit.com domain loads reasonably fast but the rest arn't
mustacheemperor 10y ago
My theory is that the mobile version of reddit has gradually evolved into slow, buggy nagware because it's designed to push you to install their app on your phone, ala facebook removing features from their own mobile site. I've never used a site that forgets I'm logged in so often or still throws error codes if you try to upvote or post a comment while logged out. I would buy a year of reddit gold if it allowed me to permanently disable the mobile site, but for now I've pretty much just ditched the site entirely when I'm not at a desktop.
brazzledazzle 10y ago
This comment is kind of shitty. This is an engineering blog post by a team that very likely does not work on the mobile site. They probably read HN and a comment that completely dismisses their work probably isn't very encouraging. I don't think your criticism is incorrect, just misplaced. There are even a lot of ways to point out that the mobile site doesn't reflect those values while praising the backend team for espousing them or remaining neutral. I'm probably overreacting but reading this really got to me. My apologies if I came off too aggressive or negative.
SnaKeZ 10y ago
It's a frontend issue, check the compact version: https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/.compact

dsp1234 10y ago

Another point of data, on mobile, navigating to reddit.com: T 0: white page T 5: to see the reddit header with logo, the rest of the page is still white T 16: to see the bar stating that I should use the app, click on the tiny mobile site link T 25: page visible behind the "app" bar stating I should use the app T 32: the bar is gone, and the site is "usable"

disiplus 10y ago

reddit has i.reddit.com (old mobile page) that is faster then the new one. i hope they dont turn that off because i use it sometimes. the new one is just slow.

SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
I use this too. It's also better UX in my opinion. In the new site, a lot of the buttons are either hard to see or too small to reliably hit with the finger on the first try.
- yoodenvranx 10y ago
  I am glad to see that I am not alone with my preference of the old mobile site. It fast, simple and it does not have any unnecessary whitespace and padding which just waste valuable space.
  - Laforet 10y ago
    The new mobile site is slkw fails in basic functions such as as preventing double posting - which happens all the time because the UI is often irresponsive.
zumu 10y ago
I suspect it may just 'feel' slow, because it hides all the content from you until the fetch requests finish.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  If it 'feels' slow, that seems functionally worse than actually being slow. It implies an unresponsive site where it could be faster. A slower site, that 'feels' faster, is more functional to any human. So to echo about half these posts, it seems to be UI/UX holding it back.

hacker_9 10y ago

Beyond performance, the entire reddit mobile experience is terrible anyway. It's advised to use the unofficial 'reddit is fun' app which is simply amazing in comparison.

brokenmachine 10y ago
I use Relay for Reddit. It's the best mobile app I've ever used, and only the second one I've ever actually paid for, there's also a free version which I used for a long time which puts ads at the bottom. The interface is great. You can swipe for (almost) everything, which makes it easy to use one-handed.
Nition 10y ago
If anyone here uses Sailfish or MeeGo, the Quickddit app for Reddit is excellent. It's on the Jolla store but it's also on GitHub: https://github.com/accumulator/Quickddit https://github.com/accumulator/Quickddit

forgotmypw 10y ago

I'm a long-time Reddit user (10+ years on my oldest account) and a mod of several subs, including a 50K+. It is with great sadness that I say this, but Reddit is rapidly moving in the direction of pulling a Digg v4. They just released for beta a new mod-mail that is unusable, so I'm guessing this new trendy but shitty design will eventually replace the whole site. I don't know what will happen after that, but I won't stick around to see it.

overcast 10y ago
Combine that with the toxic people inhabiting every popular sub reddit, it's some place I unfortunately no longer visit.
- grey-area 10y ago
  Reddit is an interesting phenomenon. The home page has been a toxic mix of memes and trash for much of its life (I looked at it a few times, but don't go there any more). The subreddits vary from highly toxic to well moderated (spacex for example), but most are so lightly moderated that they have some good links but little interesting comment content. The contrast with HN is interesting - I think the moderation here is much better and the culture is more welcoming as a result, but the home page here now just goes past too fast for it to function as a firehose on specific subjects.
  - ppod 10y ago
    HN is just more niche. HN is 842 on US alexa. Reddit is 7. The criticism that reddit gets is so naive. What other site of comparable size, where the users are mostly anonymous, has better community? Compare reddit comments with comment threads on youtube or national newspaper sites, and re-calibrate your humanity baseline.
    - hueving 10y ago
      >The criticism that reddit gets is so naive It's perfectly valid to criticize something for sucking even if there isn't a better alternative.

Klathmon 10y ago

For starters, that's not really on-topic here as this is a post about the server side's caching, having nothing to do really with any client issues. But regardless, what does the second page load take? What does the 3rd take? For many people, they go on reddit and stay on there for a significant amount of time. So that first page load is much less impactful, especially if it can enable them to have faster "pageloads" while on the site. If the site is optimized for them, then having the image/text post load in a fraction of a second, and the comments in under a second (which it does for me) seems like a good bet. That being said, they really could spend some time reducing that impact. And just to throw my experience in with the others, I'm getting much faster load times. Timed using the chrome dev tools connected to my phone, it takes 2.76 seconds to the "load" event and about 3 seconds until it's fully usable. (cache disabled, 4g tmobile network, high-end android phone, obviously these will be much worse on slower phones, slower networks, etc...)

BoorishBears 10y ago
It's bad enough it takes several seconds of loading on my iPhone when the desktop version is near instant, it's utterly broken too. Most menus don't open for me on the first try (especially in landscape) or open in the wrong place with touch targets that are "off" so I have to rotate the phone a few times. The old iOS 6 style site didn't age well visually, but it sure was fast. I miss the days when mobile sites were the fast and light version meant to work over 2G. To me it's insane a non-SPA desktop site would become a SPA mobile site
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > To me it's insane a non-SPA desktop site would become a SPA mobile site Not to me. Yes, you might pay additional time on the first load, but you save massive amounts of data (and thus, due to TCP, highly latency bound packets) when you just transfer small bytes of JSON. Oh, and that saves battery too - mobile data transfer is the hugest drain on any phone's battery.
  - BoorishBears 10y ago

jcdavis 10y ago

On my iphone 5 (yes I realize thats old), the mobile website straight up doesn't load at all, just a blank white screen. I wonder how much device testing they've done...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kalleboo 10y ago
Same on my iPhone 6s. It started happening with the iOS 10 beta, not sure if that was a coincidence...

user5994461 10y ago

> This feels like advice from the overweight gym teacher on how to do pushups. General guidelines: Always doubt advice from startup folks. Usually the more unicorn and hype they are, the less qualified they actually are. Basically, they grow by recruiting a lot of people (most inexperienced in average) and grow in all directions without a plan. To caricature, it's like a big playground.

senorjazz 10y ago

maybe the additional time is to serve the full page notice "DO YOU WANT TO USE THE APP" which they insist (for me anyway) on every single page I load.

akjainaj 10y ago

That website is very heavy on JS, that's why it's unbearably slow. I remember having to use it on a mobile with 512MB of RAM once, it literally killed my browser (probably the OOM killer)

olegkikin 10y ago

HN is a much much much simpler website, and has orders of magnitude less traffic. From what I heard, Reddit is on a pretty tight budget, and it's a pretty small team as well.

revelation 10y ago
We don't measure complexity for complexity sake, we look at the functionality offered. The fact that HN is a much much much simpler website while doing much of the same functionality is an indictment of the complexity of the Reddit mobile site. Traffic doesn't really enter into it, that is really not the limiting factor here. They just spent the past year relaunching "reddit - the startup" so their team is now plenty big, they just don't have much to show for it.
- olegkikin 10y ago
  > while doing much of the same functionality That's just not true. Reddit has a ton of extra functionality, including creation of subs, subscription to subs, controls of voting rules, user bots that run on reddit's servers (example: RemindMe), theming, tons of settings even for the regular users, moderators/admins interfaces, apps (example: ChangeTip), reply notifications, self-serving ad management system, image/video embeds. I'm sure there's a lot more, these are just the obvious features that HN doesn't have.
  - mintplant 10y ago
    > user bots that run on reddit's servers (example: RemindMe), RemindMeBot runs on its creator's own server and communicates through reddit's API as if it were a regular user. AutoModerator is the only bot I know of that runs on reddit's servers.
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y ago
  > while doing much of the same functionality If that were true, this would be a much better site.

positr0n 10y ago

Here's an awesome performance audit of reddit mobile by Paul Irish. It shows how completely unoptimized the code was back in 2015. Sadly it doesn't seem to have improved much since then. https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247 https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247

gooeyblob 10y ago
The entire codebase for reddit-mobile was rewritten. https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/compare/e3f1119e3358da7d3c56b22cc3c6c455942a9bc0...f5ba9955eb3712a44cca55bf4d98fe56c4f20e12 https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/compare/e3f1119e3358...
- zumu 10y ago
  Did the rewrite coincide with the re-skinning of the UI? Because any gains in performance are imperceptible, as the UI now hides all content until the browser has completely finished fetching. So even if it is 'faster' the UX is actually 'slower'. I
curioussavage 10y ago
The site was in beta at the time so yes no performance work had been done. The rewrite last year improved things and we are working on more performance improvements.

sharmanaetor 10y ago

Reddit has a bunch of images on the home page. HN is all text. Also as noted by others, Reddit is much more popular.

sean_patel 10y ago

> It took 8.4 seconds to load the Reddit front page on my phone. Hacker News took 1.1 seconds. How could you compare the 2? The former has images and rich media. The latter is all text, like a unix terminal. LOL

ec109685 10y ago
So do the non rich media parts of the page load in 1.1 seconds?
- sean_patel 10y ago
  Don't take it personally. You were trying to compare apples with mangoes.

panic 10y ago

Remember the HN thread for the presidential election? A single huge thread affected the server so much it had to be split up. Reddit has hundreds of threads that big.

diziet 10y ago
Well, Reddit has one or two order of magnitude more of server infrastructure and full time engineers working on their product than HN.

yoodenvranx 10y ago

> It took 8.4 seconds to load the Reddit front page on my phone. The new mobile version is a complete pile of junk! Use the old one by adding '.compact' to a normal reddit link, it's better in almost every aspect.

raldi 10y ago

HN serves the same front page to all users, other than the bar at the top. To make a reddit front page, you have to look up the hottest results of ~100 subreddits and shuffle them all together in the correct order. Literally every time a vote is cast, that could change the front page for every single user, in a different way for each one.

swsieber 10y ago
False. It cannot since it has too look up the vote status for (logged in users).
- choward 10y ago
  What?
- flashman 10y ago
  I dunno man, I think I'm going to trust the former Reddit admin (/u/raldi)
  - Strom 10y ago
    Blind trust in such a simply verifiable case is quite naive. You can easily open up the front page of HN as a logged in user and see that it contains information about which storeies you've voted for and which you've flagged. On top of that, you can click "hide" to hide stories. These will only be hidden for your specific account, not for every person who loads the front page. What's more, the go-to call-to-action by HN admins during really popular stories is to have people log out, because logged in users don't get cached results. Have a look at the comment by HN admin dang on the Trump winning story. [1] The key part being "please log out to read HN today, unless you want to comment. Then we can serve you from cache". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
    - justinlaster 10y ago
      That's not the same thing as showing different results per user. It's just tacking on the user's operations when it renders out the front page. They're two completely different operations, with completely different complexities behind them. The "hide" feature is not analogous to what reddit is doing.

slavik81 10y ago

Another test for the skeptical. I logged out of reddit and tried loading /r/programming. That subreddit has no image submissions and no obvious customization. I loaded it once, then loaded it again while timing it. It took 6.5 seconds. This was over a different connection, so I tried HN again. It took 1.0 seconds.

Laforet 10y ago
Have you tried looking at different page elements and see which ones took longer? I've always felt that the main reddit.com domain loads reasonably fast but the rest arn't

mustacheemperor 10y ago

My theory is that the mobile version of reddit has gradually evolved into slow, buggy nagware because it's designed to push you to install their app on your phone, ala facebook removing features from their own mobile site. I've never used a site that forgets I'm logged in so often or still throws error codes if you try to upvote or post a comment while logged out. I would buy a year of reddit gold if it allowed me to permanently disable the mobile site, but for now I've pretty much just ditched the site entirely when I'm not at a desktop.

brazzledazzle 10y ago

This comment is kind of shitty. This is an engineering blog post by a team that very likely does not work on the mobile site. They probably read HN and a comment that completely dismisses their work probably isn't very encouraging. I don't think your criticism is incorrect, just misplaced. There are even a lot of ways to point out that the mobile site doesn't reflect those values while praising the backend team for espousing them or remaining neutral. I'm probably overreacting but reading this really got to me. My apologies if I came off too aggressive or negative.

SnaKeZ 10y ago

It's a frontend issue, check the compact version: https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/.compact