7 ms·
The 512KB Club
- marginalia_nu 5y agoIt's a real shame you can't add sites without a github account. I'd like to add search.marginalia.nu which clocks in at about 80 Kb for a full search result page.
- hwers 5y agoDo you really care that little about advertising your site that you won’t even make a github account to help it grow?
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI care more about my principles than I care for additional visitors to my site.
- johnklos 5y agoNice idea, but how do we get more people to care about building efficient sites?
- crecker 5y agoPenalizing the websites that are heavy.
- sovok_x 5y agoI'd love to see duckduckgo to add toggleable site sorting by their common page sizes without media as a second priority, at the least.
- hwers 5y agoIn some sense this already exists (via users clicking away if it loads too slowly). So maybe the market has a nice balancing function for this already.
- Saris 5y agoIf page size and weight was used much more heavily in SEO rankings that would make a big difference.
- mdp2021 5y agoSome engines ("some") have an interest in promoting sites with advertisements returns.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoShould be pretty self-reinforcing. If sites are cropping up that load instantly, then sites that take 30 seconds to load and are sluggish to scroll start to look very bad by comparison.
- scaredginger 5y agoJust scrolling through the list, it looked like many of them were blogs and personal websites. I'd be much more interested in seeing lean corporate websites, as those are made by teams with deadlines and requirements to actually look good Edit: Just noticed https://lichess.org/ https://lichess.org/ is on the list
- hankchinaski 5y agoInfact a better score would be a combination of daily visitors and size, popularity-adjusted size so that many personal blank sites would not come at the top
- lelandfe 5y agoSo few of these are actually good sites. The majority are text-only portfolios. Go figure they’re a paltry few kB. It feels like the list is pointless, it’s saying “small sites are small” - instead of showcasing well-optimized sites that you would expect to be quite large. Here’s my submission to usurp first place: <p>lelandfe’s site
- raspyberr 5y agoI do agree with you but I think one of the points being made is that The New York Times is basically a text-only portfolio and sits at 15MB.
- lelandfe 5y agoThat the majority of that NYT homepage weight is in low-priority video does not lend much credence to it being a text-only site. On an iPhone 12, it's also a 14,000px tall site, chock full of content. The HTML document size alone nearly disqualifies it from being on this list. It feels rather... pointless? to pick on a news organization's homepage for being bloated, and then gesture at some guy's 9kB portfolio saying "see! this is speed!"
- birksherty 5y agoNYT is bloated for a news site. That is the point. Even with just the news text, it is bloated. If simply the html is that big it is bloated. Period.
- jafitc 5y agodo you really need to load 14,000px worth of content with no interaction? What if I just navigate away to the first article? The Nytimes website with the exact same look and functionality could be well under 1MB easily.
- emschlr 5y ago> The majority are text-only portfolios. Yeah... 512 KB is a lot of bytes for text-only website. For text-only sites the threshold should be much lower. Like ten times lower. 50 KB club anyone?
- Jaruzel 5y agoOooh my site (jaruzel.com) qualifies for 'Orange team'. I doubt I'll go to the effort of doing a Pull Request on GitHub to get it included. Nice Idea though.
- TacticalCoder 5y agoNice little site: Amiga / retro computing, woodworking, home cinema... I'm into these too. Was "Hutchhikes" yours (in the "geekpics")? I've got one from 1988 (since 1999) but thankfully never crashed it.
- Jaruzel 5y agoThanks for stopping by! No, that car was bought by a friend of mine who relocated to Mexico, and found out he could buy one even though he didn't know how to drive. Hence the end result. Bizarrely a while later he bought another one and crashed that too. Poor guy has plate in his head now holding his skull together.
- mdp2021 5y agoAside relevance: so this member checks his internet consumption and has a little shock seeing that he seems to have burnt over 5GB in a few hours, which were especially odd since he could not remember having done anything special, as some practical reasons rendered it impossible in that timeframe. He started suspecting malware. Than it dawned on him: in those hours he spent time scrolling one page in Reddit. Ludicrous as it is, that remains the only relevant voluntary activity. And then he planned to start monitoring consumption systematically through `iftop` (which also needs permanent in-session memory of total consumption per address/domain, by the way).
- Invictus0 5y agolichess.org is the only domain I recognized on this list
- atum47 5y agoI need to better compress the images on my site, but the code is very small...
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoThanks to this I've discovered Textpattern: https://textpattern.com/showcase/ https://textpattern.com/showcase/
- hwers 5y agoI wish there was a way to filter this for non text only sites. Yeah it loads fast and has a small footprint but that's hardly impressive when it's just a no css site containing a few paragraphs. I'd love to see some tiny impressive webassembly feats within this bound.
- hankchinaski 5y agoJust checked my site[0] and got 247kb[1] Uncompressed and 136kb compressed, the only improvements I can see is reduce image sizes and remove third party JS code, mostly injected by Cloudflare. [0] https://golang.cafe https://golang.cafe [1] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/golang.cafe/7PvRciZS/ https://gtmetrix.com/reports/golang.cafe/7PvRciZS/ edit: 215kb after removing unnecessary js third-parties (instant.page and CF rocket loader) https://gtmetrix.com/reports/golang.cafe/Xey7C7LM/ https://gtmetrix.com/reports/golang.cafe/Xey7C7LM/ ps: also the site is not a static site, it connects to postgresql and serves 2,000 requests daily on avg
- marginalia_nu 5y agoCloudFlare's supposed acceleration has been a bit underwhelming. I was diagnosing some problems with latencies and it turns out that CF adds a good 200 ms to my page loads (making them load at about 400ms instead of 200ms*), meanwhile, their own tests claim they're able to reduce my page loads down to a roaring 700 ms from the 1 second default. * depending on location
- hankchinaski 5y agoCouldn't see much difference in UX from using CF rocket loader and also instant.page js plugin so I will probably get rid of those too
- lelandfe 5y agoYour TTFB is pretty darn high for some reason, maybe a server side caching issue? Loading should be effectively instant otherwise, good job getting all critical assets inlined. You could also mark the company images as `loading="lazy"` – though you may intentionally be eagerly loading all of those now.
- hankchinaski 5y agoyes the TTFB is probably because my application logic and database queries are not optimised at all. I guess that is my next step, I have to do some profiling to figure out why. Probably just slow db query/slow database
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoHow many of these sites serve more than 1000 queries per day to human users? Most people find the benefits of small websites to be all that compelling. And most businesses seem to be responding to the incentives imposed by this state of affairs. I would love to see a listing of popular websites that are very compact.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoMy server deals with quite a bit more than that. It's also withstood two HN "hugs of death", peaking out at multiple visits-per-second (a few dozen RPS). For what it's worth, it's hosted on a consumer-grade PC off domestic broadband.
- AviationAtom 5y agoSince this centers around minimalism, I figured I'd point out, to those that don't yet know of it, that a successor to Gopher exists. It's called Gemini. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ You can even get hosting for your Gemini site there. Some sites are actually going exclusively Gemini, or partially exclusive to Gemini. Proxies to Gemini exist too.
- kstenerud 5y agoI spent a lot of time shrinking down a site of mine last year. It bulked up a little bit later but is still only 22k even with images and mobile friendliness :) https://gtmetrix.com/reports/concise-encoding.org/IbSyhS6i/ https://gtmetrix.com/reports/concise-encoding.org/IbSyhS6i/
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI hope you don't mind a critique; I struggled a bit understanding what your site was about. Took quite a bit to figure out it was an encoding scheme, after being confused whether it was a start-up or a library or what. You're answering the questions a visitor has in a sensible enough order: 1. What is it? 2. Why should I use it? 3. What does it look like? I think the proportions are off. In terms of detail, the first question is answered in a brief slogan that is very easily glossed over because it's put in a place where very little informative text usually gets put, then the second question gets a huge amount of space and details and the same points are repeated multiple times with different phrasing. Everyone claims to be "fast", "simple", "effective", "secure", "private", "cheap", "future-proof", "optimized", etc. It very easily gets dismissed as noise when you are at the same time scanning the page for clues as to what it even is about. It's hard to make a sell when what you're selling isn't clear. Maybe you could overlap 1 and 2 a bit, somehow. If it had said "the encoding scheme is easy to use" rather than "easy to use", my question would be largely answered. My sites aren't a marvel of intuitive navigation either, I don't claim to be better, but it's sometimes hard to see sometimes how other people view our sites.
- kstenerud 5y agoThank you! I'm of average skill when it comes to UX, which is definitely hurting the visibility of this. I'm also worried about how approachable the spec itself is, considering how hard it is to put onesself in the shoes of someone coming at it fresh. There's so much information, but nobody wants to be inundated... I'll play around with the positioning and ordering to see if I can make it easier to find answers to the primary questions.
- 5y ago
- skyfaller 5y agoThese lists are a fine starting point, but I think that the next step is to do some curation and showcase really nice / impressive examples of lean sites. Perhaps one approach would be to have an old-school web directory, like https://href.cool/ https://href.cool/ where you have a little screenshot and blurb about why a site is notable or worth visiting.
- amelius 5y ago512K ought to be enough for anybody ...
- cassepipe 5y agoI stumbled upon lichess.org just under 512kb in the blue team. Now wonder it feels so fast. I love lichess.org.