3 ms·

Right but that can fixed with a few million dollar and few months. I don’t think many (any?) companies fail because of web app performance

RL_Quine 6y ago
Reddit is getting there.
- tirpen 6y ago
  Definitely. You can still opt in to keep using their old interface thankfully, the difference in both performance and UX is staggering. When that option disappears from the site, so will I.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    The day they discontinue old.reddit.com is the day I stop visiting the site. The new version is like a case study in everything I hate about "new" web UX.
jdminhbg 6y ago
> (any?) Friendster is frequently cited as a potentially massive company that failed due to its poor performance: https://www.techinasia.com/awesome-startups-failed https://www.techinasia.com/awesome-startups-failed
chrismorgan 6y ago
Throwing money, people and time at a slow web app just about never improves bad performance. 999 times out of 1,000 (and I’m not exaggerating that figure), it remains where it is or gets slower. Of the remaining one in a thousand, the substantial majority are due to them realising just how bad things are and clawing back some of the performance that they have steadily thrown away, but even then they’re not improving it to where I will arbitrarily decree it “should” be. Note that I’m specifically talking about improving bad performance. If I was talking about having good performance, largely meaning designing the app to be fast from the start and never letting it get bad, the figures would be a bit more favourable, though they would still be very heavily skewed against large teams or companies. My conclusion is simply that the more people you have, the harder it is to make fast stuff. I’m quite serious about these numbers. Not all small teams can produce fast apps, but over time no large teams can produce fast apps unless they very deliberately design it in from the start, in which case it’s merely extremely difficult to maintain (again, over time).
- tpxl 6y ago
  You can fix the slow web app by rewriting it.
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    In theory, yes. In theory you can often fix a slow web app without rewriting it, too. But in practice if you have a large team, your rewrite is statistically extremely unlikely to succeed in improving performance meaningfully or even at all.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

RL_Quine 6y ago

Reddit is getting there.

tirpen 6y ago
Definitely. You can still opt in to keep using their old interface thankfully, the difference in both performance and UX is staggering. When that option disappears from the site, so will I.
- jandrese 6y ago
  The day they discontinue old.reddit.com is the day I stop visiting the site. The new version is like a case study in everything I hate about "new" web UX.

jdminhbg 6y ago

> (any?) Friendster is frequently cited as a potentially massive company that failed due to its poor performance: https://www.techinasia.com/awesome-startups-failed https://www.techinasia.com/awesome-startups-failed

chrismorgan 6y ago

Throwing money, people and time at a slow web app just about never improves bad performance. 999 times out of 1,000 (and I’m not exaggerating that figure), it remains where it is or gets slower. Of the remaining one in a thousand, the substantial majority are due to them realising just how bad things are and clawing back some of the performance that they have steadily thrown away, but even then they’re not improving it to where I will arbitrarily decree it “should” be. Note that I’m specifically talking about improving bad performance. If I was talking about having good performance, largely meaning designing the app to be fast from the start and never letting it get bad, the figures would be a bit more favourable, though they would still be very heavily skewed against large teams or companies. My conclusion is simply that the more people you have, the harder it is to make fast stuff. I’m quite serious about these numbers. Not all small teams can produce fast apps, but over time no large teams can produce fast apps unless they very deliberately design it in from the start, in which case it’s merely extremely difficult to maintain (again, over time).

tpxl 6y ago
You can fix the slow web app by rewriting it.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  In theory, yes. In theory you can often fix a slow web app without rewriting it, too. But in practice if you have a large team, your rewrite is statistically extremely unlikely to succeed in improving performance meaningfully or even at all.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]