2 ms·

Just get a Ryzen CPU with business class gigabit internet and block display ads and third party cookies. The wild-eyed web frameworks and advertisements of our

by jart 5y ago

Just get a Ryzen CPU with business class gigabit internet and block display ads and third party cookies. The wild-eyed web frameworks and advertisements of our age were designed to consume the glut created by the cheapest silver status symbol, on which they now press the limits of not only bandwidth, but also CPUs and RAM too. For me I think it was around 2015 when I started feeling the heat of my Macbook scorching my legs each time I loaded a news website. I thought, oh my, am I being swept away by the performance tide already? So if your box is twice as fast as those things, then the modern web will feel fast. What's sad is most people aren't even granted that choice.

jiggawatts 5y ago
The sad thing is that I have gigabit internet and a fast gaming PC, yet many websites are still unbearably slow. I recently got the chance to speed up a website that I often use myself as a part of my consulting work, and despite my best efforts a further 10x speed up was left on the table because of insurmountable apathy by the developers. In the last two decades, I've met one (1) web developer that cared about performance at all. One! The rest are blithely unaware of the profligate waste of CPU time and network bandwidth their "features" are consuming. Things like two different third-party APMs on top of Google Analytics, the CDN analytics, and in-house analytics taking up 90% of both the bandwidth and server load. I regularly see web sites with all caching, compression, and HTTP settings left on defaults. As in: private, off, and HTTP/1.1 only. It's mind boggling how slow these sites are, in an era where benchmarks show that modern servers can put out 100K responses per second!
- jart 5y ago
  My web server can put out 1000K gzip encoded responses per second on a cheapo $1,000 Core i9 PC. https://justine.lol/redbean/ https://justine.lol/redbean/ Here's what you do. You start off by showing people papers like this https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/34439.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... which say "users are 1.5 times more likely to choose the fast engine". That's how you get resources to do the 10x optimization. But doing the optimization isn't enough, if you can't tie the results into something people care about. To do that, you're already paying the price for Google Analytics telemetry. You can use its API to A/B test the slow vs. fast version of your website for conversions or whatever behavior you're trying to optimize. People fall in love with stuff that goes fast in unpredictable ways. Be prepared for that. Sometimes it helps to just walk around the office and watch people using your website, to get a basic idea of how they feel about it and how they're engaging. For instance you might discover they're constantly alt-tabbing to some blog while they're waiting for pages to load. In that case you can quantify a productivity impact across everyone who's using the website that likely far exceeds your own salary. Then the people who didn't care might start paying attention. All you had to do was make a web page less sluggish.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    Oh, I know. I've tried these things. It makes no difference in my experience, but that's probably mostly because I work for government departments. They have zero interest in customer engagement, or any similar metrics. The only thing they care about is not hearing internal complaints from more senior people. Those senior people don't use their own department's products! Hence... no complaints. I vividly remember trying to explain these concepts to a librarian. She wanted to implement a hugely complex "search form" where you could narrow down the search to something like: "Show me all young adult fiction about dragons written by authors who's name starts with the letter A and was published in the years 1997 to 1999". But that's an absurd scenario, and no student in the history of the world will ever use it like that. Never. They'll type in "dragons" and read the first book that has a cover picture they like. I did this. My friends did this. All of the statistics I collected in the system shows that this is what everyone else does too. The reason she wanted that search was because the old system would take tens of seconds to do any search. So you had to get the search "right" the first time, or you'd be there for tens of minutes. My version did the search in under 15ms, and even did live tab complete. I copied the Google interface with quotes for exact search, negative sign prefix for exclude, etc... Oh, and I made sure to get the highest quality book cover art for every title I possibly could. Kids love to see that, the artwork is engaging, and it motivates them to read more. Search forms? Not so much... The kids loved it, but the librarian is still a little bit grumpy that I didn't build her the two page form that she wanted!
    - jart 5y ago
      I searched for "dragons" at the Philadelphia Free Library. 5,802 results showed up. I doomscrolled through a few hundred and couldn't find Smaug, the most iconic and influential dragon of the twentieth century. https://catalog.freelibrary.org/Search/Results?lookfor=dragons&submit=&searchme=catalog&searchType=simple https://catalog.freelibrary.org/Search/Results?lookfor=drago... Then I searched Google for "book with dragon" and The Hobbit is the fourth result. Librarians are really intelligent people. All the recent engineering marvels that Google does under the hood to provide meaningful results, such as PageRank and machine learning, librarians have always been able to do in their heads. They are not unsophisticated users who click on the first picture they like. If your search algorithms are simpler than what Google does, then you can count on librarians to fill in the gaps for you. But in order to do that, they need control. Because when someone can't find something in the library, because full-text search isn't taking into consideration popularity, then what do kids do? They go to the librarian, who enters the complicated search for them, based on what they know, and they know a lot. So I think the librarian was being perfectly reasonable. You should have empowered her with the tools she needs to do her job. You could have just as easily put it behind a drop-down that's hidden by default, so both her and the kids are happy.
zbrozek 5y ago
I have a fast computer, a ridiculously fast internet connection (10000/10000), and adblock. It still doesn't feel as fast as when I had @Home (10/1 I think?) in 1999.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Depending on your used adblock, I'd guess it is the bottleneck. Plugins running in the browser are not made for this. If you are using browser plugin-based adblocking, try to disable that temporarily for testing, and exchange it with some host-based solution, for instance this https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts no matter which OS your are on. Then see if it feels faster. If you are already doing it this way, forget what I wrote :-)

by jart 5y ago

jiggawatts 5y ago

The sad thing is that I have gigabit internet and a fast gaming PC, yet many websites are still unbearably slow. I recently got the chance to speed up a website that I often use myself as a part of my consulting work, and despite my best efforts a further 10x speed up was left on the table because of insurmountable apathy by the developers. In the last two decades, I've met one (1) web developer that cared about performance at all. One! The rest are blithely unaware of the profligate waste of CPU time and network bandwidth their "features" are consuming. Things like two different third-party APMs on top of Google Analytics, the CDN analytics, and in-house analytics taking up 90% of both the bandwidth and server load. I regularly see web sites with all caching, compression, and HTTP settings left on defaults. As in: private, off, and HTTP/1.1 only. It's mind boggling how slow these sites are, in an era where benchmarks show that modern servers can put out 100K responses per second!

jart 5y ago
My web server can put out 1000K gzip encoded responses per second on a cheapo $1,000 Core i9 PC. https://justine.lol/redbean/ https://justine.lol/redbean/ Here's what you do. You start off by showing people papers like this https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/34439.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... which say "users are 1.5 times more likely to choose the fast engine". That's how you get resources to do the 10x optimization. But doing the optimization isn't enough, if you can't tie the results into something people care about. To do that, you're already paying the price for Google Analytics telemetry. You can use its API to A/B test the slow vs. fast version of your website for conversions or whatever behavior you're trying to optimize. People fall in love with stuff that goes fast in unpredictable ways. Be prepared for that. Sometimes it helps to just walk around the office and watch people using your website, to get a basic idea of how they feel about it and how they're engaging. For instance you might discover they're constantly alt-tabbing to some blog while they're waiting for pages to load. In that case you can quantify a productivity impact across everyone who's using the website that likely far exceeds your own salary. Then the people who didn't care might start paying attention. All you had to do was make a web page less sluggish.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Oh, I know. I've tried these things. It makes no difference in my experience, but that's probably mostly because I work for government departments. They have zero interest in customer engagement, or any similar metrics. The only thing they care about is not hearing internal complaints from more senior people. Those senior people don't use their own department's products! Hence... no complaints. I vividly remember trying to explain these concepts to a librarian. She wanted to implement a hugely complex "search form" where you could narrow down the search to something like: "Show me all young adult fiction about dragons written by authors who's name starts with the letter A and was published in the years 1997 to 1999". But that's an absurd scenario, and no student in the history of the world will ever use it like that. Never. They'll type in "dragons" and read the first book that has a cover picture they like. I did this. My friends did this. All of the statistics I collected in the system shows that this is what everyone else does too. The reason she wanted that search was because the old system would take tens of seconds to do any search. So you had to get the search "right" the first time, or you'd be there for tens of minutes. My version did the search in under 15ms, and even did live tab complete. I copied the Google interface with quotes for exact search, negative sign prefix for exclude, etc... Oh, and I made sure to get the highest quality book cover art for every title I possibly could. Kids love to see that, the artwork is engaging, and it motivates them to read more. Search forms? Not so much... The kids loved it, but the librarian is still a little bit grumpy that I didn't build her the two page form that she wanted!
  - jart 5y ago
    I searched for "dragons" at the Philadelphia Free Library. 5,802 results showed up. I doomscrolled through a few hundred and couldn't find Smaug, the most iconic and influential dragon of the twentieth century. https://catalog.freelibrary.org/Search/Results?lookfor=dragons&submit=&searchme=catalog&searchType=simple https://catalog.freelibrary.org/Search/Results?lookfor=drago... Then I searched Google for "book with dragon" and The Hobbit is the fourth result. Librarians are really intelligent people. All the recent engineering marvels that Google does under the hood to provide meaningful results, such as PageRank and machine learning, librarians have always been able to do in their heads. They are not unsophisticated users who click on the first picture they like. If your search algorithms are simpler than what Google does, then you can count on librarians to fill in the gaps for you. But in order to do that, they need control. Because when someone can't find something in the library, because full-text search isn't taking into consideration popularity, then what do kids do? They go to the librarian, who enters the complicated search for them, based on what they know, and they know a lot. So I think the librarian was being perfectly reasonable. You should have empowered her with the tools she needs to do her job. You could have just as easily put it behind a drop-down that's hidden by default, so both her and the kids are happy.

zbrozek 5y ago

I have a fast computer, a ridiculously fast internet connection (10000/10000), and adblock. It still doesn't feel as fast as when I had @Home (10/1 I think?) in 1999.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Depending on your used adblock, I'd guess it is the bottleneck. Plugins running in the browser are not made for this. If you are using browser plugin-based adblocking, try to disable that temporarily for testing, and exchange it with some host-based solution, for instance this https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts no matter which OS your are on. Then see if it feels faster. If you are already doing it this way, forget what I wrote :-)