4 ms·

Genuine question. What's the underlying issue behind this concern? When I'm reading your numbers, my first reaction is that 5-15MB these days is peanuts. What u

Genuine question. What's the underlying issue behind this concern? When I'm reading your numbers, my first reaction is that 5-15MB these days is peanuts. What use cases am I missing?

travisd 5y ago
In web contexts, we usually shoot for sub 1MB (ideally ~250kb for static sites). The main reason is usually just optimizing for mobile experiences. People expect to wait a while to download a 200MB app, but if you have to wait 5s for a webpage you’re very likely to click away. Of course it’s partially a function of your target audience. Notion and Retool (for example) are able to ship massive multi megabyte bundles because they’re productivity apps targeted mostly towards people with desktops and high speed internet connections. If HN were to ship a 15MB bundle it’d be virtually unusable on mobile for a lot of people (myself included, and I live in Seattle!).
- andreygrehov 5y ago
  I agree. I'm all for static, low-size websites and that is something I always strive for. But, the internet speed keeps improving. 5MB app won't take 5s to load these days. 1 megabit-per-second connection needs 8 seconds to load 1MB. Most internet providers offer 300Mbit/s minimum ($39/month). But even with 50Mbit/s channel, it'll only take 0.8s to load 5MB.
  - mattnewton 5y ago
    It very well might depending on the audience and the percentile you target. 90th percentile times show that those larger speeds are not consistent, often showing a bifurcated distribution where the tail is experiencing loss / latency that compounds the more request and the larger they are. Of course if the development benefits for your team outweigh it, it makes sense to do it. Just mean to say advertised cellphone connection speeds are not a reliable benchmark to hit.
  - hbn 5y ago
    Not everyone has access to all options from internet providers. There's people on slow, satellite internet. Hell, there's still a non-negligible amount of people still using dial-up in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/185532/us-household-dial-up-internet-connection-usage-by-state-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/185532/us-household-dial... (URL says 2009, but it was updated with statistics for 2019)
  - freedomben 5y ago
    When I moved away from Alaska a couple of years ago, the fastest speed available to me was 768k. sites with several mb were virtually unusable, and so many of the would refresh or ajax recklessly as though bandwidth were huge and infinite. much of the modern web was completely unusable.
oefrha 5y ago
The Website Obesity Crisis was prescient: > If present trends continue, there is the real chance that articles warning about page bloat could exceed 5 megabytes in size by 2020. > The problem with picking any particular size as a threshold is that it encourages us to define deviancy down. Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
smoe 5y ago
I work in Latin America and with the kind of low end phones and flakey mobile connections that a lot of people use here, 5-15MB is a pretty big issue. E.g. what I have seen from metrics is phones spending seconds just parsing/compiling those huge javascript bundles loading websites that don't do much more than turning json into html. A lot of modern web is a nightmare to use if you have a ~$50 android phone and are lucky if you have a decent 3G connection.
da39a3ee 5y ago
You seem to be forgetting all the people in the world that are not on fast network connections. Genuine question: how did you manage to forget something so huge?
- andreygrehov 5y ago
  I'm originally from Ukraine. My mom's internet connection there is 100Mbit/s and she pays $9 per month ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - da39a3ee 5y ago
    ok, so sounds like ukraine is in the subset of the world with fast internet, or at least your mum's town. But I don't see how that answers the question -- what about rural south america, rural africa?
    - andreygrehov 5y ago
      I mean, pretty much every tech serves a percentile of population. It can not please everyone.
      - da39a3ee 5y ago
        Yes. You were asking what use cases you were missing. The answer was people on slow networks.
karmanyaahm 5y ago
I'm on crowded public wifi right now and the site spent 4-5 seconds on the loading screen.

Genuine question. What's the underlying issue behind this concern? When I'm reading your numbers, my first reaction is that 5-15MB these days is peanuts. What use cases am I missing?

travisd 5y ago

In web contexts, we usually shoot for sub 1MB (ideally ~250kb for static sites). The main reason is usually just optimizing for mobile experiences. People expect to wait a while to download a 200MB app, but if you have to wait 5s for a webpage you’re very likely to click away. Of course it’s partially a function of your target audience. Notion and Retool (for example) are able to ship massive multi megabyte bundles because they’re productivity apps targeted mostly towards people with desktops and high speed internet connections. If HN were to ship a 15MB bundle it’d be virtually unusable on mobile for a lot of people (myself included, and I live in Seattle!).

andreygrehov 5y ago
I agree. I'm all for static, low-size websites and that is something I always strive for. But, the internet speed keeps improving. 5MB app won't take 5s to load these days. 1 megabit-per-second connection needs 8 seconds to load 1MB. Most internet providers offer 300Mbit/s minimum ($39/month). But even with 50Mbit/s channel, it'll only take 0.8s to load 5MB.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  It very well might depending on the audience and the percentile you target. 90th percentile times show that those larger speeds are not consistent, often showing a bifurcated distribution where the tail is experiencing loss / latency that compounds the more request and the larger they are. Of course if the development benefits for your team outweigh it, it makes sense to do it. Just mean to say advertised cellphone connection speeds are not a reliable benchmark to hit.
- hbn 5y ago
  Not everyone has access to all options from internet providers. There's people on slow, satellite internet. Hell, there's still a non-negligible amount of people still using dial-up in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/185532/us-household-dial-up-internet-connection-usage-by-state-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/185532/us-household-dial... (URL says 2009, but it was updated with statistics for 2019)
- freedomben 5y ago
  When I moved away from Alaska a couple of years ago, the fastest speed available to me was 768k. sites with several mb were virtually unusable, and so many of the would refresh or ajax recklessly as though bandwidth were huge and infinite. much of the modern web was completely unusable.

oefrha 5y ago

The Website Obesity Crisis was prescient: > If present trends continue, there is the real chance that articles warning about page bloat could exceed 5 megabytes in size by 2020. > The problem with picking any particular size as a threshold is that it encourages us to define deviancy down. Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

smoe 5y ago

I work in Latin America and with the kind of low end phones and flakey mobile connections that a lot of people use here, 5-15MB is a pretty big issue. E.g. what I have seen from metrics is phones spending seconds just parsing/compiling those huge javascript bundles loading websites that don't do much more than turning json into html. A lot of modern web is a nightmare to use if you have a ~$50 android phone and are lucky if you have a decent 3G connection.

da39a3ee 5y ago

You seem to be forgetting all the people in the world that are not on fast network connections. Genuine question: how did you manage to forget something so huge?

andreygrehov 5y ago
I'm originally from Ukraine. My mom's internet connection there is 100Mbit/s and she pays $9 per month ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- da39a3ee 5y ago
  ok, so sounds like ukraine is in the subset of the world with fast internet, or at least your mum's town. But I don't see how that answers the question -- what about rural south america, rural africa?
  - andreygrehov 5y ago
    I mean, pretty much every tech serves a percentile of population. It can not please everyone.
    - da39a3ee 5y ago
      Yes. You were asking what use cases you were missing. The answer was people on slow networks.

karmanyaahm 5y ago

I'm on crowded public wifi right now and the site spent 4-5 seconds on the loading screen.