6 ms·

Damn, those load times. This is on all my tests – fast internet or dialup, 2016 desktop or ancient android phone – significantly faster than the real HN. Wow.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
significantly faster than the real HN. Proof? :)
dcousens 9y ago
Opposite experience here. Near 4-5x slower than actual HN for me.
- arikr 9y ago
  What browser / internet speed / other diagnostics info?
lucasmullens 9y ago
This new site is around 1MB, regular HN is around 50KB. They're not even close. It's just that navigating to new pages is faster since it doesn't take a full page refresh.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- scottmf 9y ago
  Which makes for a better user experience. What’s your point?
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Not really. Most of the point of HN is to navigate to it and then away from it (to other sites).
    - scottmf 9y ago
      The slightly higher upfront cost is only incurred once.
      - sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Well, it's incurred each time you navigate away and then back to HN, which happens any time you click on a link on the front page, right?
        scottmf 9y ago
        Browser cache
      - mcgarnagle 9y ago
        @sillysaurus3 you can actually leverage browser caching as well.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Correct, but so is commenting, loading comments, going back to the home page, etc. All these actions are a lot faster on that site than on real HN with Firefox Nightly on PC and mobile.
zappo2938 9y ago
Clone: 22 requests | 1.1 MB transferred | Finish:2.86 s | DOMContentLoaded 636 ms | Load:2.87 ms Real Hacker News: 6 requests | 11.5 KB transferred | Finish: 336 ms | DOMContentLoaded: 325 ms | Load: 343 ms Hacker News is just a static cached webpage
- kuschku 9y ago
  That’s on first load – all future loads are significantly faster on this clone.
  - codedokode 9y ago
    1.1Mb is 100 times larger than 11Kb.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      That would be the case when the bandwidth was the limit, but it’s not. The limit is in the immense latency for opening a new connection. Opening a network socket with TLS can take over 4 seconds on mobile, which is why ideally you’d even use an open websocket for communication instead of new GET requests. Navigating to a page in this version causes one or two network requests, in the real HN it takes far more just to check if the images have changed, the CSS has changed, etc.
      - codedokode 9y ago
        Using websocket looks like overengineering because HTTP/2.0 allows to use a single connection for multiple parallel requests. Using React to build a simple (student level) site like HN is overengineering too in my opinion. If you don't want to reload the page when navigating you can just reload HTML content with jQuery or fetch() without using client side rendering, without draining device battery and without loading 1 Mb of Javascript that will take much more space in RAM. SPA approach should be used for interactive applications able to work in offline mode, able to provide rich experience on mobile devices etc.
- 9y ago
bdcravens 9y ago
It caches HN API in memory (probably why the demo site is out of sync with live HN) https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-react-graphql/blob/de5793ed62f452ec5cafc7384a255a27c9a51692/src/data/HNDataAPI.js#L128 https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-react-graphql/blob/...
kuschku 9y ago
Yeesh, thanks for the downvotes on an actually measured result. I'm trying this in Firefox nightly (stylo enabled, webrender not). Even on an old phone over throttled internet, that page is faster than real HN for page transitions, but the same happens on 100Mbps WiFi with my Nexus 5X, or on LAN with my desktop. In all cases, that site is significantly faster than real HN in loading and rendering (I can see the real HN's icon slowly load on every page refresh — that page doesn't do that). If you get different results, you're probably using Chrome, which is over-aggressively caching.
- detaro 9y ago
  On a slow laptop on a reasonably fast connection (university WLAN) using FF 57 Beta the clone is slower. It is slightly faster than real HN at showing the orange bar and the tan content box (which I find quite jarring), the text then pops in noticeably later. Some pages also appear to first show error pages that then get replaced with content. (This even happens on repeat visits to a page, where this seems to cheat and take the comments from cache instead of checking for new ones) Not sure how to explain that difference.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

significantly faster than the real HN. Proof? :)

dcousens 9y ago

Opposite experience here. Near 4-5x slower than actual HN for me.

arikr 9y ago
What browser / internet speed / other diagnostics info?

lucasmullens 9y ago

This new site is around 1MB, regular HN is around 50KB. They're not even close. It's just that navigating to new pages is faster since it doesn't take a full page refresh.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
scottmf 9y ago
Which makes for a better user experience. What’s your point?
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Not really. Most of the point of HN is to navigate to it and then away from it (to other sites).
  - scottmf 9y ago
    The slightly higher upfront cost is only incurred once.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Well, it's incurred each time you navigate away and then back to HN, which happens any time you click on a link on the front page, right?
      - scottmf 9y ago
        Browser cache
    - mcgarnagle 9y ago
      @sillysaurus3 you can actually leverage browser caching as well.
kuschku 9y ago
Correct, but so is commenting, loading comments, going back to the home page, etc. All these actions are a lot faster on that site than on real HN with Firefox Nightly on PC and mobile.

zappo2938 9y ago

kuschku 9y ago
That’s on first load – all future loads are significantly faster on this clone.
- codedokode 9y ago
  1.1Mb is 100 times larger than 11Kb.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    That would be the case when the bandwidth was the limit, but it’s not. The limit is in the immense latency for opening a new connection. Opening a network socket with TLS can take over 4 seconds on mobile, which is why ideally you’d even use an open websocket for communication instead of new GET requests. Navigating to a page in this version causes one or two network requests, in the real HN it takes far more just to check if the images have changed, the CSS has changed, etc.
    - codedokode 9y ago
      Using websocket looks like overengineering because HTTP/2.0 allows to use a single connection for multiple parallel requests. Using React to build a simple (student level) site like HN is overengineering too in my opinion. If you don't want to reload the page when navigating you can just reload HTML content with jQuery or fetch() without using client side rendering, without draining device battery and without loading 1 Mb of Javascript that will take much more space in RAM. SPA approach should be used for interactive applications able to work in offline mode, able to provide rich experience on mobile devices etc.
9y ago

bdcravens 9y ago

It caches HN API in memory (probably why the demo site is out of sync with live HN) https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-react-graphql/blob/de5793ed62f452ec5cafc7384a255a27c9a51692/src/data/HNDataAPI.js#L128 https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-react-graphql/blob/...

kuschku 9y ago

Yeesh, thanks for the downvotes on an actually measured result. I'm trying this in Firefox nightly (stylo enabled, webrender not). Even on an old phone over throttled internet, that page is faster than real HN for page transitions, but the same happens on 100Mbps WiFi with my Nexus 5X, or on LAN with my desktop. In all cases, that site is significantly faster than real HN in loading and rendering (I can see the real HN's icon slowly load on every page refresh — that page doesn't do that). If you get different results, you're probably using Chrome, which is over-aggressively caching.

detaro 9y ago
On a slow laptop on a reasonably fast connection (university WLAN) using FF 57 Beta the clone is slower. It is slightly faster than real HN at showing the orange bar and the tan content box (which I find quite jarring), the text then pops in noticeably later. Some pages also appear to first show error pages that then get replaced with content. (This even happens on repeat visits to a page, where this seems to cheat and take the comments from cache instead of checking for new ones) Not sure how to explain that difference.