7 ms·
Today we learned: Removing an advanced library from a simple project increases performance. Sorry for being sarcastic but don't you also find this too obvious?
by positivecomment 9y ago
Today we learned: Removing an advanced library from a simple project increases performance.
Sorry for being sarcastic but don't you also find this too obvious?
- afshinmeh 9y agoI was thinking about the same thing. Well, you can remove CSS as well, I bet it would improve the performance.
- romanovcode 9y agoGo next level: Remove the whole browser and make a native application - gain even more performance!
- akerro 9y agoI just use lynx to browse and block downloading js files by default. I wrote this comment using ed and curl.
- nindalf 9y agoI don't know why you'd use such heavy duty applications for such a simple use case. I merely use a butterfly to induce cosmic rays to flip the bits of memory needed to send a http request.
- positivecomment 9y agoA butterfly is way more complex than React.js.
- tomxor 9y agoHow true, in fact butterflies are more complex than all software put together :P you just broke that whole branch of xkcd jokes dammit!
- jnbiche 9y agoHa, you kids and your fancy lynx browsers. I do just fine with Netcat and typing in the HTTP requests by hand. Works just fine!
- ry_ry 9y agoI wrote this with a torch and a length of fibre optic cable.
- danvasquez29 9y agoI think it's the 50% part that we're meant to pay attention to. For me that's a pretty drastic, "why would you ever put this on the client side now that you know this" kind of thing.
- brokentone 9y agoBecause it provides a robust, consistent, isomorphic framework which many people have decided that certain benefits (for us common tooling, maintenance, consistent implementation across the org, write once run twice isomorphism) outweigh the costs (interactable time, download size, etc). Everyone has to make their own choices, but this news was not surprising and did not change our opinion.
- falcolas 9y agoPlaying devil's advocate for a moment: So, the developer experience trumps the user experience, in an industry where fractions of a second of load time can cost a company customers and conversions?
- mattdeboard 9y agoCalm down. This is for a single, static landing page.
- falcolas 9y ago> Calm down. A rather unnecessary statement, don't you think? > This is for a single, static landing page. Which at one point wasn't a static landing page. Netflix has something of a captive market at this point in time; but could a newer startup scrambling to gain users afford to make the same choices?
- megaman22 9y agoI would hope that a startup scrambling to gain users would be able to explain in a simple static html site why their service is worth bothering with. If I'm not particularly interested, I'm not going to wait around for mountains of JS to download and execute, and the typical content-free startup landing page full of hero images, stock photos, and vague bullet points to load up.
- narag 9y agoToday we learned: Removing an advanced library from a simple project increases performance. The library that slow down the UX terribly is "advanced" while the project that is being the victim is "simple".
- jordache 9y agoNetflix website is a simple project!? Wha?
- jd3 9y agoit displays information about videos that are stored on a server - it's not that complicated.
- jordache 9y agooh yeah.. some jquery or vanilla JS would be fine. no need to abstract a workflow or anything.. it's literally like a scrolling marquee.. a couple of guys on it should be sufficient.. No need for Git either.
- positivecomment 9y agoYou would be right but they mean the damn landing page :)
- grandalf 9y agoYou are correct. This is such an obvious, simple thing that anyone with a small bit of experience optimizing a static website for render completion would understand. React is designed to allow a server-side render and an async load of the js library to allow it to be used in this kind of scenario without impacting perceived load time or "time to interaction".
- clarle 9y agoI work on the team at Netflix that gave this talk. Thought I'd share a bit more context on the reasons that we did this beyond a picture from a tweet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15568305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15568305 Let me know if you have any questions!
- CyberDildonics 9y ago> Sorry for being sarcastic but don't you also find this too obvious? If we pay attention to how bloated most web pages are, it seems it is not obvious at all.
- jasonlotito 9y agoWhat's funny is that your conclusion is incorrect.
- dang 9y agoIt would be much better to say how. Then your comment would be substantive and we would learn something.
- jasonlotito 9y agoTrue. I was replying to a sarcastic comment in a sarcastic way. Mea culpa. > Removing an advanced library They made it clear they didn't remove the library. They still load it later, and still use it. > from a simple project They make it clear it's not a simple project. In fact, it's probably one of the more complex pieces of the project. > increases performance. No, it increased specific metrics that they cared about. > Sorry for being sarcastic but don't you also find this too obvious? Your comment, or their results? Your comment is incorrect based on a single slide and taken out of context. As for the actual reasons, no, they are not obvious at all. Incredibly intelligent people didn't find it obvious, as this was something they clearly didn't see at the beginning, and instead relied on measurements. Premature optimization and all that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]