7 ms·

Which loads faster? Pit websites against each other.

43 points by mikexstudios 16y ago

mikexstudios 16y ago
Here's the associated blog post from the developer: http://onecreativeblog.com/post/781952553/announcing-whichloadsfaster http://onecreativeblog.com/post/781952553/announcing-whichlo...
unshift 16y ago
looks interesting, but serial should be the default mode.
- onecreativenerd 16y ago
  You might be right. I considered that, but it doesn't have as much of an impact factor on the user, which is really important for getting the word out about performance (why the site exists in the first place). I probably doesn't matter too much as long as you have a ~3Mbps connection or higher (see Mike Belshe's "Effective Bandwidth of HTTP" graph on http://www.belshe.com/2010/05/24/more-bandwidth-doesnt-matter-much/ http://www.belshe.com/2010/05/24/more-bandwidth-doesnt-matte...) because the TCP transmission rate can't ramp up high enough on each object to saturate the connection. It's possible, however that the objects will interact with each other by causing differing queueing latency and possibly loss in the bottleneck router and by changing the order of scheduler events on the client OS. Also, it may be better subject the two pages to the same network conditions (at least in the last mile) while they're loading, esp. on mobile.
j_baker 16y ago
Here's one I didn't expect: HN loads 5.5x faster than reddit.
- seancron 16y ago
  My results for HN vs reddit: Average over 10 runs: tie HN: 1681ms / reddit: 1652ms
- jedberg 16y ago
  Yeah, I would have put HN at least 10x faster. ;)
aston 16y ago
Dunno if this holds up for others, but Bing is substantially faster than Google's homepage to load, even with all of the crazy graphics... Impressive.
- parallax7d 16y ago
  Due to the distribution of servers, and the way data is routed about the internet, i would imagine it would be different for everyone.
- what 16y ago
  Bing's homepage consistently loads faster for me too. But Google's search results tend to load faster.
- SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Fwiw, Google loaded 20% faster for me.
- onecreativenerd 16y ago
  I am only measuring the "onDOMContentLoaded" or jQuery's cross-browser equivalent. It's certainly possible for pages to load objects after that using javascript, which "cheats" a little for purposes of this comparison. What really matters in practice is "time to first interaction" which is when the user thinks your site is useful. Next up on my feature list is having a button to indicate which pages seemed to load faster to you. The idea is you can send a link out to your friends and get their impressions, which is more valuable than the numbers you can get with an automated tool. :)
vijaydev 16y ago
neatly done and pretty useful.
rouli 16y ago
very cool!
known 16y ago
http://google.com http://google.com 2.7 × faster (1198 ms / 3191 ms) than https://google.com https://google.com
- bad_alloc 16y ago
  Pretty much the same with google.de/google.de (36%), my blog (52%) and xkcd.com (44%). This killed it for me actually. Another observation is that the right window is always faster at my end. Can anybody else confirm this?
poundy 16y ago
This uses iframes to pit websites against each other. Twitter breaks out of iframes and so do other websites.
- marknutter 16y ago
  Any idea how to prevent this from happening? Google seems to have figured it out in their google images iframes, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they did it.
  - user24 16y ago
    It looks like google parse the page serverside to detect break out of frames scripts. Here's a manually engineered example - I searched for a demo of a break out of frames script and forced the URL into a google images request: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.internet.com/icom_includes/footers/img/icom_logo_qsfooter.png&imgrefurl=http://javascript.internet.com/navigation/manual-frame-break-demo.html&usg=__nA7P9hJ3tihz2fLto_VlTZ96K2M=&h=891&w=883&sz=234&hl=en&start=1&itbs=1&tbnid=IYlLzX-w4vX2AM:&tbnh=146&tbnw=145&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfoo%26hl%3Den%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1 http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.internet.c... THe page just displays a "you are being redirected" message straight away, so it must be detected at the server level. Smart.
    - user24 16y ago
      Having said that, if you look at a genuine result from twitter: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/108462666/home_sscredits_bigger.jpg&imgrefurl=http://twitter.com/homeproject&usg=__gzb2ICTasTI-R6GrhHpOIfNxoVs=&h=3780&w=2835&sz=442&hl=en&start=1&itbs=1&tbnid=_uftMx2399b4tM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=113&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsite:twitter.com%26hl%3Den%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1 http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://a1.twimg.com/p... google doesn't detect or stop that breaking out of frames. But maybe twitter are just managing to avoid detection by google's code.. The code on that page is: <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ if (window.top !== window.self) {document.write = "";window.top.location = window.self.location; setTimeout(function(){document.body.innerHTML='';},1);window.self.onload=function(evt){document.body.innerHTML='';};} //]]> </script> which doesn't seem like it would be too hard to detect.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
Very cool idea. Could play with this for hours.
ThomPete 16y ago
Bing is faster on mine (FF) On others it's google that is faster (They use Chrome) So browsers seems to affect it too.
ck2 16y ago
The reporting and accuracy is wrong. I clearly see Bing loading images AFTER the timer has stopped. This is just timing the main html, it's wrong.
- onecreativenerd 16y ago
  I believe Bing loads images asynchronously after the DOM content has loaded.

43 points by mikexstudios 16y ago

Here's the associated blog post from the developer: http://onecreativeblog.com/post/781952553/announcing-whichloadsfaster http://onecreativeblog.com/post/781952553/announcing-whichlo...

unshift 16y ago

looks interesting, but serial should be the default mode.

onecreativenerd 16y ago
You might be right. I considered that, but it doesn't have as much of an impact factor on the user, which is really important for getting the word out about performance (why the site exists in the first place). I probably doesn't matter too much as long as you have a ~3Mbps connection or higher (see Mike Belshe's "Effective Bandwidth of HTTP" graph on http://www.belshe.com/2010/05/24/more-bandwidth-doesnt-matter-much/ http://www.belshe.com/2010/05/24/more-bandwidth-doesnt-matte...) because the TCP transmission rate can't ramp up high enough on each object to saturate the connection. It's possible, however that the objects will interact with each other by causing differing queueing latency and possibly loss in the bottleneck router and by changing the order of scheduler events on the client OS. Also, it may be better subject the two pages to the same network conditions (at least in the last mile) while they're loading, esp. on mobile.

j_baker 16y ago

Here's one I didn't expect: HN loads 5.5x faster than reddit.

seancron 16y ago
My results for HN vs reddit: Average over 10 runs: tie HN: 1681ms / reddit: 1652ms
jedberg 16y ago
Yeah, I would have put HN at least 10x faster. ;)

aston 16y ago

Dunno if this holds up for others, but Bing is substantially faster than Google's homepage to load, even with all of the crazy graphics... Impressive.

parallax7d 16y ago
Due to the distribution of servers, and the way data is routed about the internet, i would imagine it would be different for everyone.
what 16y ago
Bing's homepage consistently loads faster for me too. But Google's search results tend to load faster.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
Fwiw, Google loaded 20% faster for me.
onecreativenerd 16y ago
I am only measuring the "onDOMContentLoaded" or jQuery's cross-browser equivalent. It's certainly possible for pages to load objects after that using javascript, which "cheats" a little for purposes of this comparison. What really matters in practice is "time to first interaction" which is when the user thinks your site is useful. Next up on my feature list is having a button to indicate which pages seemed to load faster to you. The idea is you can send a link out to your friends and get their impressions, which is more valuable than the numbers you can get with an automated tool. :)

vijaydev 16y ago

neatly done and pretty useful.

rouli 16y ago

very cool!

known 16y ago

http://google.com http://google.com 2.7 × faster (1198 ms / 3191 ms) than https://google.com https://google.com

bad_alloc 16y ago
Pretty much the same with google.de/google.de (36%), my blog (52%) and xkcd.com (44%). This killed it for me actually. Another observation is that the right window is always faster at my end. Can anybody else confirm this?

poundy 16y ago

This uses iframes to pit websites against each other. Twitter breaks out of iframes and so do other websites.

marknutter 16y ago
Any idea how to prevent this from happening? Google seems to have figured it out in their google images iframes, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they did it.
- user24 16y ago
  It looks like google parse the page serverside to detect break out of frames scripts. Here's a manually engineered example - I searched for a demo of a break out of frames script and forced the URL into a google images request: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.internet.com/icom_includes/footers/img/icom_logo_qsfooter.png&imgrefurl=http://javascript.internet.com/navigation/manual-frame-break-demo.html&usg=__nA7P9hJ3tihz2fLto_VlTZ96K2M=&h=891&w=883&sz=234&hl=en&start=1&itbs=1&tbnid=IYlLzX-w4vX2AM:&tbnh=146&tbnw=145&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfoo%26hl%3Den%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1 http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.internet.c... THe page just displays a "you are being redirected" message straight away, so it must be detected at the server level. Smart.
  - user24 16y ago
    Having said that, if you look at a genuine result from twitter: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/108462666/home_sscredits_bigger.jpg&imgrefurl=http://twitter.com/homeproject&usg=__gzb2ICTasTI-R6GrhHpOIfNxoVs=&h=3780&w=2835&sz=442&hl=en&start=1&itbs=1&tbnid=_uftMx2399b4tM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=113&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsite:twitter.com%26hl%3Den%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1 http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://a1.twimg.com/p... google doesn't detect or stop that breaking out of frames. But maybe twitter are just managing to avoid detection by google's code.. The code on that page is: <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ if (window.top !== window.self) {document.write = "";window.top.location = window.self.location; setTimeout(function(){document.body.innerHTML='';},1);window.self.onload=function(evt){document.body.innerHTML='';};} //]]> </script> which doesn't seem like it would be too hard to detect.

SkyMarshal 16y ago

Very cool idea. Could play with this for hours.

ThomPete 16y ago

Bing is faster on mine (FF) On others it's google that is faster (They use Chrome) So browsers seems to affect it too.

ck2 16y ago

The reporting and accuracy is wrong. I clearly see Bing loading images AFTER the timer has stopped. This is just timing the main html, it's wrong.

onecreativenerd 16y ago
I believe Bing loads images asynchronously after the DOM content has loaded.