6 ms·

The article seems to put the burden of performance on the developers... but I've been in situations where no matter what I did in favor of performance, the effo

by guggle 7y ago

The article seems to put the burden of performance on the developers... but I've been in situations where no matter what I did in favor of performance, the efforts were always negated by the installation of third party marketing tools. Things like retargetting platforms, tracking scripts or even recommandation systems. And let's not talk about the unreasonable client expectations about features per page...

okaleniuk 7y ago
This is so true. You can maneuver within client expectations, and you certainly can optimize every particular features but marketing tools are often non-negotiable. From the user's stand point - they are pure overhead, too. For my own project, I decided to ditch them completely. Including the analytics. Well, it would have been nice seeing all the nice plots but at the end of the day they just show vanity metrics. The real impact is immeasurable.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  There should be analytics solutions that don't put the burden on the client, server-side products. Or lightweight ones that mainly track button clicks and navigation, instead of e.g. recording all mouse and keyboard interactions. I want to think basic analytics has a very low impact on performance. Ads, on the other hand... Which all inject their own analytics as well.
  - Moru 7y ago
    There are analytic tools that run on the log files. If that is to high load on the server I'm sure they can be run offline by downloading the logs to your local machine.
vast 7y ago
He actually says that devs try to do their best but the business models make it hard. I can very well resonate with that. With decent effort we could make out site respond in a tenth of the current time. But no one ever asks for it nor will give you the opportunity. Even performance centric companies like Google are now doing an insanely bad job. Business applications perform bad even on modern desktops. They will probably try to keep the user facing parts of the ad machine fast, but everything else is not what I expect from a company with such mindset. They of course never did anything to improve the state of ad tech.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Google ad bidding requires 200 milliseconds to run the ad auction. I could send a packet all the way to Australia and back in that time! If you're trying to make a page load instantly (100 milliseconds - the edge of human perception), it isn't possible with Google ads, even the text only ones.
  - atoav 7y ago
    Although 100ms would be a decent loading speed compared to todays standards, 100ms is not the edge of human perception. Tm100ms equals 2.5 frames in 25 fps and even a 1 frame blank image (40ms) is noticeable at that speed. In my experience the edge of visual perception is somewhere below 10ms
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      I am considering the 'click on thing, see result' perception loop, which is far slower than the 'see one thing happen and then see another thing happen, and not be sure if they happened at the same time or sequentially'.
      - atq2119 7y ago
        Even the difference between ~16ms and ~33ms is noticeable to most people for the "click to see result" perception loop -- that's the difference between 60fps and 30fps. 100ms is a glacially slow reaction time in comparison, and it's a bit sad that most of the tech industry is setting their performance goals so low. (In fairness, I suspect most people wouldn't be able to verbally express why the 16ms feels better to them than the 33ms, but would subconsciously notice the difference.)
hinkley 7y ago
I have unfortunately seen firsthand projects where the marketing crap was over 70% of the page load time. Put another way, the weight of the tracking software was 2x the cost of generating the entire rest of the page. Do you have any idea how soul crushing it is to work your ass of on site performance, to have people passive-aggressively question the team's abilities when the numbers are even 100ms too high... And then when you're done some nosey assholes go and add over 2 seconds to your page loads just so they can do something ethically questionable. And the fact they waited til the end to add it on just proves that they knew it was going to be bad news but they did it anyway. It sucks. It kills trust for the organization, and it kills respect for everyone in the decision chain. My coworkers and I joke from time to time about running an ethical advertising network with reasonable software. Well, they're joking. I don't think they know I'm not entirely.
- oAlbe 7y ago
  > My coworkers and I joke from time to time about running an ethical advertising network with reasonable software. Well, they're joking. I don't think they know I'm not entirely. How would that work? And more importantly, how would it stay ethical? I imagine the very basic idea would be to not need to track users, which removes the need for the huge swaths of Javascript that pollute the internet. But would that be profitable? I'm curious to know what thought you put into this so far.
  - cavneb 7y ago
    This is exactly what we built and have been running for over 2 years. CodeFund [1] is an ethical advertising platform that is open source, does not permit or perform any tracking, and only displays ads based on the context of the site. We load our ads async so there’s no slowdown of the page. We are also open with our finances. We exist to fund open source maintainers, bloggers and builders. [1] https://codefund.io https://codefund.io
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Yeah that’s the question isn’t it. Let’s say I run a B Corp, or a non profit. Do I really want to associate with some of these networks? Or on the flip side, I run a website. I want to make some money to pay my expenses, but do I really want to inflict these ad networks on my readership? It’s not the sort of project that’s going to make you rich. It’s the sort of project that lets you sleep better.
pmlnr 7y ago
I'm an outsider to these kind of processes: how is a 3rd party marketing tool added to a site at a BigCo? I'm still fairly certain it involves developers, who, in theory, should have pre- and post- number on performance, visits, etc. Or am I delusional?
- luckylion 7y ago
  I believe the point is that developers don't have a say in whether some 3rd party lib gets added. Some PM gets a lunch with a vendor, they are being sold on the miraculous technology that will totally disrupt everything and that's that.
  - guggle 7y ago
    > I believe the point is that developers don't have a say in whether some 3rd party lib gets added And even more so with tools like tagmanager... not only you have no say, you also don't know. And one day the site breaks or is too slow to be useful and someone puts the blame on you.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    They do have a say, they just value keeping their jobs more than doing the right thing. That isn't ridiculous, but they need to stop blaming everyone else (who are essentially doing the same thing) for the problem as though they aren't contributing.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      With that understanding of "having a say", you're having a say in being kidnapped, too. "Hey, you could've fought the guy with the gun... you just valued your life more than doing the right thing". It's not a useful definition imho. It's not that there aren't any developers contributing to the problem, those building the fat 3rd-party scripts definitely are (though they're likely under different constraints), but the argument for "you're contributing if you don't use your credentials to secretly edit out the javascript that loads that tool and get fired" is pretty far out there, I think.
steve_taylor 7y ago
I especially hate those tools that allow the marketing department to change the page, e.g. Adobe Target. They work client-side, making their changes after the html has loaded. They don’t work well with universal/isomorphic web apps, because they have no way of telling when hydration occurs, so they can really mess a page up if they do their filthy business too soon. But assuming that doesn’t happen, there’s still the matter of what they call “flicker”, which is a silly word that means the original content is visible initially, and then marketing’s changes kick in. To avoid so-called flicker, a page-hiding snippet is inserted into the page, making the entire page transparent until the tool modifies the page. These tools are often blocked by ad blockers, so the page will either remain blank, or will be restored by the page hiding snippet after a few seconds. You can make a blazingly fast website, and then marketing comes along and takes a big dump on it.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  From Biter experience the sort of sites you have to do remedial work on are not blazing fast some common problems I see are : using unoptimised images adding massive amounts of javascript messed up canonicals internal links requiring redirects to add or remove trailing / terrible design choices - oh yes lets put 10 products on a single page
KaiserPro 7y ago
Sorry, but no. You can't just blame it on the marketing department. Yes it is a business decision, but, you have the power to demonstrate that slower pages lead to less clicks and hurt the bottom line. If the FT's developers can manage to sell this, then so can you, We, as developers can't live in a bubble. We are part of the business and we need to steer the business as we see fit.
- guggle 7y ago
  Been there, done that. Alas, with poor results. Now I'm happy in non-business activities.
- nextlevelwizard 7y ago
  OK, you go to your boss and tell him that because of the marketing team's scripts the app takes twice as long to load. Your boss on other hand says: "Who cares? This is how we make money". You try to explain that lower income people with slower/lower end devices can't access the content. Boss asks how much money are we losing because of this. You have no answer. What do you do? Almost standard HN answer when it comes to moral programming questions is to stand by your principles and resign immediately, but this usually comes from people who haven't had to deal with paying bills or become homeless. Even then if you don't do it someone else who needs the money will. What would you KaiserPro do in this situation?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - brlewis 7y ago
    > OK, you go to your boss and tell him that because of the marketing team's scripts the app takes twice as long to load. Your boss on other hand says: "Who cares? This is how we make money". What company do you work for that makes more money by causing your app to load twice as slow? I think it's reasonable to expect a developer to measure and present the correlation between performance and revenue.
    - 7y ago
brlewis 7y ago
This is acknowledged at the end of the article, in a section called "Performance is an ethical consideration, now what?"

by guggle 7y ago

okaleniuk 7y ago

This is so true. You can maneuver within client expectations, and you certainly can optimize every particular features but marketing tools are often non-negotiable. From the user's stand point - they are pure overhead, too. For my own project, I decided to ditch them completely. Including the analytics. Well, it would have been nice seeing all the nice plots but at the end of the day they just show vanity metrics. The real impact is immeasurable.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
There should be analytics solutions that don't put the burden on the client, server-side products. Or lightweight ones that mainly track button clicks and navigation, instead of e.g. recording all mouse and keyboard interactions. I want to think basic analytics has a very low impact on performance. Ads, on the other hand... Which all inject their own analytics as well.
- Moru 7y ago
  There are analytic tools that run on the log files. If that is to high load on the server I'm sure they can be run offline by downloading the logs to your local machine.

vast 7y ago

He actually says that devs try to do their best but the business models make it hard. I can very well resonate with that. With decent effort we could make out site respond in a tenth of the current time. But no one ever asks for it nor will give you the opportunity. Even performance centric companies like Google are now doing an insanely bad job. Business applications perform bad even on modern desktops. They will probably try to keep the user facing parts of the ad machine fast, but everything else is not what I expect from a company with such mindset. They of course never did anything to improve the state of ad tech.

londons_explore 7y ago
Google ad bidding requires 200 milliseconds to run the ad auction. I could send a packet all the way to Australia and back in that time! If you're trying to make a page load instantly (100 milliseconds - the edge of human perception), it isn't possible with Google ads, even the text only ones.
- atoav 7y ago
  Although 100ms would be a decent loading speed compared to todays standards, 100ms is not the edge of human perception. Tm100ms equals 2.5 frames in 25 fps and even a 1 frame blank image (40ms) is noticeable at that speed. In my experience the edge of visual perception is somewhere below 10ms
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    I am considering the 'click on thing, see result' perception loop, which is far slower than the 'see one thing happen and then see another thing happen, and not be sure if they happened at the same time or sequentially'.
    - atq2119 7y ago
      Even the difference between ~16ms and ~33ms is noticeable to most people for the "click to see result" perception loop -- that's the difference between 60fps and 30fps. 100ms is a glacially slow reaction time in comparison, and it's a bit sad that most of the tech industry is setting their performance goals so low. (In fairness, I suspect most people wouldn't be able to verbally express why the 16ms feels better to them than the 33ms, but would subconsciously notice the difference.)

hinkley 7y ago

I have unfortunately seen firsthand projects where the marketing crap was over 70% of the page load time. Put another way, the weight of the tracking software was 2x the cost of generating the entire rest of the page. Do you have any idea how soul crushing it is to work your ass of on site performance, to have people passive-aggressively question the team's abilities when the numbers are even 100ms too high... And then when you're done some nosey assholes go and add over 2 seconds to your page loads just so they can do something ethically questionable. And the fact they waited til the end to add it on just proves that they knew it was going to be bad news but they did it anyway. It sucks. It kills trust for the organization, and it kills respect for everyone in the decision chain. My coworkers and I joke from time to time about running an ethical advertising network with reasonable software. Well, they're joking. I don't think they know I'm not entirely.

oAlbe 7y ago
> My coworkers and I joke from time to time about running an ethical advertising network with reasonable software. Well, they're joking. I don't think they know I'm not entirely. How would that work? And more importantly, how would it stay ethical? I imagine the very basic idea would be to not need to track users, which removes the need for the huge swaths of Javascript that pollute the internet. But would that be profitable? I'm curious to know what thought you put into this so far.
- cavneb 7y ago
  This is exactly what we built and have been running for over 2 years. CodeFund [1] is an ethical advertising platform that is open source, does not permit or perform any tracking, and only displays ads based on the context of the site. We load our ads async so there’s no slowdown of the page. We are also open with our finances. We exist to fund open source maintainers, bloggers and builders. [1] https://codefund.io https://codefund.io
- hinkley 7y ago
  Yeah that’s the question isn’t it. Let’s say I run a B Corp, or a non profit. Do I really want to associate with some of these networks? Or on the flip side, I run a website. I want to make some money to pay my expenses, but do I really want to inflict these ad networks on my readership? It’s not the sort of project that’s going to make you rich. It’s the sort of project that lets you sleep better.

pmlnr 7y ago

I'm an outsider to these kind of processes: how is a 3rd party marketing tool added to a site at a BigCo? I'm still fairly certain it involves developers, who, in theory, should have pre- and post- number on performance, visits, etc. Or am I delusional?

luckylion 7y ago
I believe the point is that developers don't have a say in whether some 3rd party lib gets added. Some PM gets a lunch with a vendor, they are being sold on the miraculous technology that will totally disrupt everything and that's that.
- guggle 7y ago
  > I believe the point is that developers don't have a say in whether some 3rd party lib gets added And even more so with tools like tagmanager... not only you have no say, you also don't know. And one day the site breaks or is too slow to be useful and someone puts the blame on you.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  They do have a say, they just value keeping their jobs more than doing the right thing. That isn't ridiculous, but they need to stop blaming everyone else (who are essentially doing the same thing) for the problem as though they aren't contributing.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    With that understanding of "having a say", you're having a say in being kidnapped, too. "Hey, you could've fought the guy with the gun... you just valued your life more than doing the right thing". It's not a useful definition imho. It's not that there aren't any developers contributing to the problem, those building the fat 3rd-party scripts definitely are (though they're likely under different constraints), but the argument for "you're contributing if you don't use your credentials to secretly edit out the javascript that loads that tool and get fired" is pretty far out there, I think.

steve_taylor 7y ago

I especially hate those tools that allow the marketing department to change the page, e.g. Adobe Target. They work client-side, making their changes after the html has loaded. They don’t work well with universal/isomorphic web apps, because they have no way of telling when hydration occurs, so they can really mess a page up if they do their filthy business too soon. But assuming that doesn’t happen, there’s still the matter of what they call “flicker”, which is a silly word that means the original content is visible initially, and then marketing’s changes kick in. To avoid so-called flicker, a page-hiding snippet is inserted into the page, making the entire page transparent until the tool modifies the page. These tools are often blocked by ad blockers, so the page will either remain blank, or will be restored by the page hiding snippet after a few seconds. You can make a blazingly fast website, and then marketing comes along and takes a big dump on it.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
From Biter experience the sort of sites you have to do remedial work on are not blazing fast some common problems I see are : using unoptimised images adding massive amounts of javascript messed up canonicals internal links requiring redirects to add or remove trailing / terrible design choices - oh yes lets put 10 products on a single page

KaiserPro 7y ago

Sorry, but no. You can't just blame it on the marketing department. Yes it is a business decision, but, you have the power to demonstrate that slower pages lead to less clicks and hurt the bottom line. If the FT's developers can manage to sell this, then so can you, We, as developers can't live in a bubble. We are part of the business and we need to steer the business as we see fit.

guggle 7y ago
Been there, done that. Alas, with poor results. Now I'm happy in non-business activities.
nextlevelwizard 7y ago
OK, you go to your boss and tell him that because of the marketing team's scripts the app takes twice as long to load. Your boss on other hand says: "Who cares? This is how we make money". You try to explain that lower income people with slower/lower end devices can't access the content. Boss asks how much money are we losing because of this. You have no answer. What do you do? Almost standard HN answer when it comes to moral programming questions is to stand by your principles and resign immediately, but this usually comes from people who haven't had to deal with paying bills or become homeless. Even then if you don't do it someone else who needs the money will. What would you KaiserPro do in this situation?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- brlewis 7y ago
  > OK, you go to your boss and tell him that because of the marketing team's scripts the app takes twice as long to load. Your boss on other hand says: "Who cares? This is how we make money". What company do you work for that makes more money by causing your app to load twice as slow? I think it's reasonable to expect a developer to measure and present the correlation between performance and revenue.
  - 7y ago

brlewis 7y ago

This is acknowledged at the end of the article, in a section called "Performance is an ethical consideration, now what?"