4 ms·

> we're over-indexing on "as fast as possible" Solid research on this exists, so there is not much to deny, at least when your goal is selling to the average u

> we're over-indexing on "as fast as possible" Solid research on this exists, so there is not much to deny, at least when your goal is selling to the average user. But: where is this magical place where people put heavy emphasis on performance? It certainly isn't here, and I would like to visit it for once. Companies caring, or giving their programmer the time to care, about performance are absolutely a rare sight. Unless they work in areas in which they are forced to care about it, and even then many stick to the minimum. Snappy, low latency software is such a delight to encounter because it is just so damn rare. Especially on the web, I constantly feel like I'm wading through molasses, and the only reason I am able to endure this constant, agonizing pain is that I've gotten so used to it...

vbezhenar 4y ago
Web is inherently slow. You need to try hard to build a slow desktop app (using native libraries). There're some simple rules to follow if you want a snappy desktop app (like running heavy or I/O tasks in a separate thread). If your app is huge (like MS word), it might be slow, but that's another level of the problem. There're no simple rules if you want to build a snappy web app. You need to think about performance on all levels. You need to think about TLS handshake. Does your certificate fits into first TCP packet? Does your entire conversation fits into first ten TCP packets? That's hard stuff. Is your CSS layout fast enough? Did you think about every resource your website uses? That's just an observation. I don't know what to do. I don't even know how would I make it better. Web stack is mostly reasonable. Sometimes web stack goes to great lengths in pursue of performance, like replacing TCP with QUIC. That's huge technical accomplishment. WebAssembly is pretty fast for a sandboxed VM. JS is crazy fast for a dynamic language. Yet some startup webapp will make 60 HTTP queries on its first page and that's considered a norm.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
  > Web is inherently slow. Absolutely, still there is "normal web latency" slow, "regular website" slow and then there is "reddit redesign" (and other popular sites) slow. Taking the latter as an example, it is easy to check how much faster it could be by using old.reddit.com instead. For that type of slowness I have very little understanding, it's just a regression.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  I tried building a modern Windows app to just show a grid of items, and performance was terrible. After I had done my part in creating the view, the framework just performed poorly for things like resizing or re-ordering cells (from like a sort).

vbezhenar 4y ago

Web is inherently slow. You need to try hard to build a slow desktop app (using native libraries). There're some simple rules to follow if you want a snappy desktop app (like running heavy or I/O tasks in a separate thread). If your app is huge (like MS word), it might be slow, but that's another level of the problem. There're no simple rules if you want to build a snappy web app. You need to think about performance on all levels. You need to think about TLS handshake. Does your certificate fits into first TCP packet? Does your entire conversation fits into first ten TCP packets? That's hard stuff. Is your CSS layout fast enough? Did you think about every resource your website uses? That's just an observation. I don't know what to do. I don't even know how would I make it better. Web stack is mostly reasonable. Sometimes web stack goes to great lengths in pursue of performance, like replacing TCP with QUIC. That's huge technical accomplishment. WebAssembly is pretty fast for a sandboxed VM. JS is crazy fast for a dynamic language. Yet some startup webapp will make 60 HTTP queries on its first page and that's considered a norm.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
> Web is inherently slow. Absolutely, still there is "normal web latency" slow, "regular website" slow and then there is "reddit redesign" (and other popular sites) slow. Taking the latter as an example, it is easy to check how much faster it could be by using old.reddit.com instead. For that type of slowness I have very little understanding, it's just a regression.
madeofpalk 4y ago
I tried building a modern Windows app to just show a grid of items, and performance was terrible. After I had done my part in creating the view, the framework just performed poorly for things like resizing or re-ordering cells (from like a sort).