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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

by 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.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    I did sort the titles by popularity. I also had typo-correction, similar to what Google does. Also, these are tiny school libraries, where at most you have a couple of pages of results even for popular key words. I'm not an idiot either! :)

by jart 5y ago

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.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I did sort the titles by popularity. I also had typo-correction, similar to what Google does. Also, these are tiny school libraries, where at most you have a couple of pages of results even for popular key words. I'm not an idiot either! :)