4 ms·

Anecdotal, but I've encountered so many legacy HTTP/1 applications on typical corporate VPN networks where the latency was horrible (due to the VPN and also due

by heipei 6y ago

Anecdotal, but I've encountered so many legacy HTTP/1 applications on typical corporate VPN networks where the latency was horrible (due to the VPN and also due to the backend responses adding even more latency). What I've done in some cases is just thrown an HTTP/2 proxy in front of these and saw an immediate and very user-perceptible performance improvement for the user. So much so that people kept asking why using the proxied version I stood up was so much faster than going directly to the origin server.

ktpsns 6y ago
This is actually quite a good example that websites are bloated and this problem is tried to be solved or worked-around at the protocol level. Which is adding even more bloat and craft in terms of code complexity. These are the two sides of complexity: It can create marvelous web applications and it can create no visible advantage.
- heipei 6y ago
  Yes, some websites are certainly bloated and for those it is simply a band-aid. But other websites really do make dozens of requests and there is no way to bundle or reduce these. Just think about a photo-sharing website or forum which loads thumbnails or user avatars for dozens of users in a discussion. This is not something that you can sprite together.
  - labawi 6y ago
    Sure you can. Even without javascript. If you really wanted to, you could even make it work in IE 5, in a single request (I think). I we're discussing whether is reasonable - 9/10 slow pages I have encountered are slow because of "content" they push on you and would add even more garbage if they could get away with it. Of the rest - most were the opposite of engineered. Tiny minority that can't be bothered to optimize - I don't mind. You mention sites with sprites, but I would really like to see an example of a sites that are slow on HTTP<2 for good reasons, i.e. not 90% of data being ads, trackers, popups, auto-playing videos and generating content via multi-MB javascript libraries, because that's how it's done these days.

by heipei 6y ago

ktpsns 6y ago

This is actually quite a good example that websites are bloated and this problem is tried to be solved or worked-around at the protocol level. Which is adding even more bloat and craft in terms of code complexity. These are the two sides of complexity: It can create marvelous web applications and it can create no visible advantage.

heipei 6y ago
Yes, some websites are certainly bloated and for those it is simply a band-aid. But other websites really do make dozens of requests and there is no way to bundle or reduce these. Just think about a photo-sharing website or forum which loads thumbnails or user avatars for dozens of users in a discussion. This is not something that you can sprite together.
- labawi 6y ago
  Sure you can. Even without javascript. If you really wanted to, you could even make it work in IE 5, in a single request (I think). I we're discussing whether is reasonable - 9/10 slow pages I have encountered are slow because of "content" they push on you and would add even more garbage if they could get away with it. Of the rest - most were the opposite of engineered. Tiny minority that can't be bothered to optimize - I don't mind. You mention sites with sprites, but I would really like to see an example of a sites that are slow on HTTP<2 for good reasons, i.e. not 90% of data being ads, trackers, popups, auto-playing videos and generating content via multi-MB javascript libraries, because that's how it's done these days.