18 ms·

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased.

by ikeboy 10y ago

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which caused so many users with slow connections to start using the product that load times actually increased.

Namrog84 10y ago
This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics. A nice chart showing how many users are in each bucket of load time would be far more useful. One that you could easily change the bucketsize from 0.1ms to 1 second and these types of 'digging' wouldn't even be a second thought.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- castratikron 10y ago
  >This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics. The average human has, on average, one testicle and one ovary, but there aren't many humans who can actually fit this description.
swanson 10y ago
I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
- antisthenes 10y ago
  One wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video. Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing. You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.
  - yellowapple 10y ago
    In my observation (of people who still use dial-up here in the US), they usually just do something else (like make dinner or watch TV) while the video loads.
  - discreteevent 10y ago
    They don't watch videos (speaking from experience). But you do not and have never needed to watch TV to be well educated. The same is true of the internet. The tragedy that the post points out is that text and diagrams are being artificially weighed down with video-like anchors for no good reason.
  - Raed667 10y ago
    if you have that kind of speed you watch Youtube in 144p !
    - 77pt77 10y ago
      I have done that many times and it's doable for most things that don't have hard-coded subs.
  - acdha 10y ago
    This was the baseline experience everywhere in the 90s: people would just do something else while they waited for things to download over dialup. Clients for things like email, Usenet, browsers, etc. commonly had batch modes where you could queue large downloads so you could basically see what's new, select a bunch of large things, and then let it download while you got a cup of coffee / dinner / slept.
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      Not sure what your comment has to do with mine. I used Internet in the 90s and dial-up specifically as recently as 2004 - and have quite a good memory of the experience. Internet at dial-up speed was an extremely valuable commodity, to the point of disabling images in the browser and only downloading the most essential things (which is about as far from a youtube video you can get) - like documents and zipped installers (after researching that it was what you actually needed) and checking email. Internet "videos" didn't really even exist as content before ~2005 and Youtube. The biggest player before them was Break.com, which posted a whopping 10-15 videos a day. While someone may have spent several hours waiting for a key software installer to download, almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ To illustrate my point even further, the speed we're talking about isn't even dial-up speed. It's 6.5kbit/second, which makes it almost an order of magnitude slower than a 56k modem! 10 times slower! And people are actually suggesting that someone would spend that valuable bandwidth to spend days to load a video...
dba7dba 10y ago
Funny anecdote about the freeway system of southern California. When they were initially planning the system in 1930s, 40s, they were planning to have the system in use for next 100 years. So they built over sized roads (like 10 lane freeway, without having to stop for traffic lights, that go THROUGH center of a major city). When the system proved so car friendly, more and more people moved in and bought cars. Within in a short period of time (much shorter than 100), the system is completely jammed. Always look for unintended consequences...
- rhizome 10y ago
  Braess' Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I always wonder about this. You have to reach saturation eventually, right?
  - argonaut 10y ago
    This isn't an example of Braess' paradox.
- ggreer 10y ago
  Isn't that a good unintended consequence? They built out infrastructure which attracted lots of people & jobs. Today, SoCal is home to world-leading firms in entertainment & aerospace. They also have top-tier research and educational institutions.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Which is why, when discussing infrastructure upgrades in our Hackerspace, I keep reminding that infrastructure is an enabler - it should not be built to support current needs, it needs a healthy margin to enable people to do more. People always find interesting ways to use up extra capacity.
forrestthewoods 10y ago
Page Weight Matters by Chris Zacharias. http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
SilasX 10y ago
Hah! A Jevons Effect[1] in a web site's bandwidth! [1] When an increase in the efficiency with which a resource is used causes total usage to increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- hueving 10y ago
  I'm not sure why this gets a special term. It sounds like basic supply and demand. If you decrease the price of something by increasing the efficiency of production, you will obviously capture more of the demand curve. What am I missing?
  - abraae 10y ago
    By giving it a special term, additional commentary/analysis can coalesce around it, such as that "governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising".
  - daveguy 10y ago
    Well, if you'd follow the link you'd see that Jevons identified this phenomenon in the mid 1800's with respect to coal usage. It probably wasn't so obvious then.
  - SilasX 10y ago
    A lot of people naively assume that if you can use a resource more efficiently, then total use will go down, "because you don't need as much, right?" See: the entire popular support for efficiency mandates. (Edit: Also, this very example -- I certainly didn't expect that a faster site would allow that many more users: my model was more "either they want to see your site, or they don't", i.e. inelastic demand.) The (common) error is to neglect the additional uses people will put a resource to when its cost of use goes down. ("Great news! We get free water now! Wha ... hey, why are you putting in an ultra-thirsty lawn??! You don't need that!") Also, I wouldn't call it basic supply and demand; depending on the specifics (inelasticiy of demand, mainly), total usage may not actually go up with efficiency.
samuell 10y ago
I've tried using Google products from Africa (Ethiopia ... last time this January), and generally, it is right out unusable. JS-heavy apps like GMail will never load properly at all. This while the connection in itself is not THAT bad. I use to use a 3G/4G mobile connection and it generally works excellent, with pretty quick load times, for everything else than javascript-heavy web apps. I have a hard time understanding why this issue is not paid more attention. Ethiopia alone has some 99 million inhabitants, with smart phone usage growing by the hour. Some sources say "the country could have some 103 million mobile subscribers by 2020, as well as 56 million internet subscribers" [1]. [1] https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Ethiopia-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Ethiopia-Telecoms-Mobile-a...
- tangue 10y ago
  It's not only about connection speed but also about infrastructure. If you look at this map https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ you'll see that your packets have a looong way to reach their data center. AWS is no better than Google on this point. Guess it's not bankable
  - witty_username 10y ago
    That only adds about 200-300ms RTT I'd guess. I live in India and use many websites which are hosted in the US, and they work fine.
    - estsauver 10y ago
      (Hello from Kenya) There are usually CDN nodes in India. Cloudfront has edge nodes there, google's cdn does. There's also a Mumbai AWS datacentre. When you get far away from the common edges, it gets real noticeable.
      - witty_username 10y ago
        ~$ ping imgur.com PING imgur.com (151.101.40.193) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 151.101.40.193 (151.101.40.193): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=342 ms imgur.com works fine ~$ ping python.org PING python.org (23.253.135.79) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 23.253.135.79 (23.253.135.79): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=267 ms python.org works fine news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com also works fine even though I'm logged in (there's about a 300ms, 700ms delay in the Network tab of Chrome's devtools for news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com)
sogen 10y ago
Read somewhere it was YouTube
markatkinson 10y ago
As someone who lives in Africa, hoorah! More of this please. For me the best feeling is visiting a web page that is almost entirely text based. It loads in a few seconds which feels like quite a rare feeling these days.
inian 10y ago
this was in relation to Project Feather of the Youtube - the Youtube website did not even load before for them and when it did, they started watching more videos even though it took more than 20 seconds to load!

by ikeboy 10y ago

Namrog84 10y ago

This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics. A nice chart showing how many users are in each bucket of load time would be far more useful. One that you could easily change the bucketsize from 0.1ms to 1 second and these types of 'digging' wouldn't even be a second thought.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
castratikron 10y ago
>This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics. The average human has, on average, one testicle and one ovary, but there aren't many humans who can actually fit this description.

swanson 10y ago

I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

antisthenes 10y ago
One wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video. Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing. You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.
- yellowapple 10y ago
  In my observation (of people who still use dial-up here in the US), they usually just do something else (like make dinner or watch TV) while the video loads.
- discreteevent 10y ago
  They don't watch videos (speaking from experience). But you do not and have never needed to watch TV to be well educated. The same is true of the internet. The tragedy that the post points out is that text and diagrams are being artificially weighed down with video-like anchors for no good reason.
- Raed667 10y ago
  if you have that kind of speed you watch Youtube in 144p !
  - 77pt77 10y ago
    I have done that many times and it's doable for most things that don't have hard-coded subs.
- acdha 10y ago
  This was the baseline experience everywhere in the 90s: people would just do something else while they waited for things to download over dialup. Clients for things like email, Usenet, browsers, etc. commonly had batch modes where you could queue large downloads so you could basically see what's new, select a bunch of large things, and then let it download while you got a cup of coffee / dinner / slept.
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    Not sure what your comment has to do with mine. I used Internet in the 90s and dial-up specifically as recently as 2004 - and have quite a good memory of the experience. Internet at dial-up speed was an extremely valuable commodity, to the point of disabling images in the browser and only downloading the most essential things (which is about as far from a youtube video you can get) - like documents and zipped installers (after researching that it was what you actually needed) and checking email. Internet "videos" didn't really even exist as content before ~2005 and Youtube. The biggest player before them was Break.com, which posted a whopping 10-15 videos a day. While someone may have spent several hours waiting for a key software installer to download, almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ To illustrate my point even further, the speed we're talking about isn't even dial-up speed. It's 6.5kbit/second, which makes it almost an order of magnitude slower than a 56k modem! 10 times slower! And people are actually suggesting that someone would spend that valuable bandwidth to spend days to load a video...

dba7dba 10y ago

Funny anecdote about the freeway system of southern California. When they were initially planning the system in 1930s, 40s, they were planning to have the system in use for next 100 years. So they built over sized roads (like 10 lane freeway, without having to stop for traffic lights, that go THROUGH center of a major city). When the system proved so car friendly, more and more people moved in and bought cars. Within in a short period of time (much shorter than 100), the system is completely jammed. Always look for unintended consequences...

rhizome 10y ago
Braess' Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I always wonder about this. You have to reach saturation eventually, right?
- argonaut 10y ago
  This isn't an example of Braess' paradox.
ggreer 10y ago
Isn't that a good unintended consequence? They built out infrastructure which attracted lots of people & jobs. Today, SoCal is home to world-leading firms in entertainment & aerospace. They also have top-tier research and educational institutions.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Which is why, when discussing infrastructure upgrades in our Hackerspace, I keep reminding that infrastructure is an enabler - it should not be built to support current needs, it needs a healthy margin to enable people to do more. People always find interesting ways to use up extra capacity.

forrestthewoods 10y ago

Page Weight Matters by Chris Zacharias. http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

SilasX 10y ago

Hah! A Jevons Effect[1] in a web site's bandwidth! [1] When an increase in the efficiency with which a resource is used causes total usage to increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

hueving 10y ago
I'm not sure why this gets a special term. It sounds like basic supply and demand. If you decrease the price of something by increasing the efficiency of production, you will obviously capture more of the demand curve. What am I missing?
- abraae 10y ago
  By giving it a special term, additional commentary/analysis can coalesce around it, such as that "governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising".
- daveguy 10y ago
  Well, if you'd follow the link you'd see that Jevons identified this phenomenon in the mid 1800's with respect to coal usage. It probably wasn't so obvious then.
- SilasX 10y ago
  A lot of people naively assume that if you can use a resource more efficiently, then total use will go down, "because you don't need as much, right?" See: the entire popular support for efficiency mandates. (Edit: Also, this very example -- I certainly didn't expect that a faster site would allow that many more users: my model was more "either they want to see your site, or they don't", i.e. inelastic demand.) The (common) error is to neglect the additional uses people will put a resource to when its cost of use goes down. ("Great news! We get free water now! Wha ... hey, why are you putting in an ultra-thirsty lawn??! You don't need that!") Also, I wouldn't call it basic supply and demand; depending on the specifics (inelasticiy of demand, mainly), total usage may not actually go up with efficiency.

samuell 10y ago

I've tried using Google products from Africa (Ethiopia ... last time this January), and generally, it is right out unusable. JS-heavy apps like GMail will never load properly at all. This while the connection in itself is not THAT bad. I use to use a 3G/4G mobile connection and it generally works excellent, with pretty quick load times, for everything else than javascript-heavy web apps. I have a hard time understanding why this issue is not paid more attention. Ethiopia alone has some 99 million inhabitants, with smart phone usage growing by the hour. Some sources say "the country could have some 103 million mobile subscribers by 2020, as well as 56 million internet subscribers" [1]. [1] https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Ethiopia-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Ethiopia-Telecoms-Mobile-a...

tangue 10y ago
It's not only about connection speed but also about infrastructure. If you look at this map https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ you'll see that your packets have a looong way to reach their data center. AWS is no better than Google on this point. Guess it's not bankable
- witty_username 10y ago
  That only adds about 200-300ms RTT I'd guess. I live in India and use many websites which are hosted in the US, and they work fine.
  - estsauver 10y ago
    (Hello from Kenya) There are usually CDN nodes in India. Cloudfront has edge nodes there, google's cdn does. There's also a Mumbai AWS datacentre. When you get far away from the common edges, it gets real noticeable.
    - witty_username 10y ago
      ~$ ping imgur.com PING imgur.com (151.101.40.193) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 151.101.40.193 (151.101.40.193): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=342 ms imgur.com works fine ~$ ping python.org PING python.org (23.253.135.79) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 23.253.135.79 (23.253.135.79): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=267 ms python.org works fine news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com also works fine even though I'm logged in (there's about a 300ms, 700ms delay in the Network tab of Chrome's devtools for news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com)

sogen 10y ago

Read somewhere it was YouTube

markatkinson 10y ago

As someone who lives in Africa, hoorah! More of this please. For me the best feeling is visiting a web page that is almost entirely text based. It loads in a few seconds which feels like quite a rare feeling these days.

inian 10y ago

this was in relation to Project Feather of the Youtube - the Youtube website did not even load before for them and when it did, they started watching more videos even though it took more than 20 seconds to load!