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I use a >10 years old X3470 for my college PC, which works surprisingly well for most computing-intensive tasks like compiling, virtualization, and running serv

I use a >10 years old X3470 for my college PC, which works surprisingly well for most computing-intensive tasks like compiling, virtualization, and running services in the background. It is however lagging behind horribly in web browsing, because of its poor single thread performance. When I see posts like these, I become even more afraid of what the web is becoming. I don't want to have any website fetching itself piecemeal, freezing my browser window for ~5 seconds while the browser logic scrambles to reconstitute content from a million pieces.

dgb23 3y ago
Streaming HTML documents is basically the default for the majority of sites, because most sites run on PHP.
acdha 3y ago
Don’t worry about this: this is how most sites on the web worked 20 years ago because PHP, classic ASP, ColdFusion, etc. didn’t buffer. The reason people moved away from it is error handling: it was basically a cliche that you’d see an error message halfway through a page which had started out fine because there’s no way to go back and retract the HTTP 200 & start of the page which you had just sent. The negatives you mentioned are already happening but that’s due to the widespread JavaScript culture of trying to put as much in the client side code as possible while not measuring performance except by having developers ask whether it seems fast enough on their M2 MacBook Pros with fiber connections.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > because PHP, classic ASP, ColdFusion, etc. didn’t buffer. ASP (and I assume the others, my memory of them is more hazy) could buffer but it wasn't the default. You could control when the buffer was flushed if needed, to push initial content while something larger was being produced, heading towards the same compromise documented here (selective buffering) but from the other direction.
  - acdha 3y ago
    PHP could, too, but it required an extension which wasn’t enabled by default and had some caveats about memory use and performance way back then. I know this because I used it to implement gzip compression in PHP 3 (or maybe really early 4?) with a hook to compress each chunk before sending it, which really helped our customer’s product pages & reports with tons of repetitive HTML.
dspillett 3y ago
This particular method is unlikely to tax your elderly CPU any extra. It is just allowing other supporting data (CSS and script files) to be downloaded while the server churns creating the rest of the content (perhaps waiting for slow DB replies). I expect AirBnB is already unpleasant on such a machine, this won't make it any worse!

dgb23 3y ago

Streaming HTML documents is basically the default for the majority of sites, because most sites run on PHP.

acdha 3y ago

Don’t worry about this: this is how most sites on the web worked 20 years ago because PHP, classic ASP, ColdFusion, etc. didn’t buffer. The reason people moved away from it is error handling: it was basically a cliche that you’d see an error message halfway through a page which had started out fine because there’s no way to go back and retract the HTTP 200 & start of the page which you had just sent. The negatives you mentioned are already happening but that’s due to the widespread JavaScript culture of trying to put as much in the client side code as possible while not measuring performance except by having developers ask whether it seems fast enough on their M2 MacBook Pros with fiber connections.

dspillett 3y ago
> because PHP, classic ASP, ColdFusion, etc. didn’t buffer. ASP (and I assume the others, my memory of them is more hazy) could buffer but it wasn't the default. You could control when the buffer was flushed if needed, to push initial content while something larger was being produced, heading towards the same compromise documented here (selective buffering) but from the other direction.
- acdha 3y ago
  PHP could, too, but it required an extension which wasn’t enabled by default and had some caveats about memory use and performance way back then. I know this because I used it to implement gzip compression in PHP 3 (or maybe really early 4?) with a hook to compress each chunk before sending it, which really helped our customer’s product pages & reports with tons of repetitive HTML.

dspillett 3y ago

This particular method is unlikely to tax your elderly CPU any extra. It is just allowing other supporting data (CSS and script files) to be downloaded while the server churns creating the rest of the content (perhaps waiting for slow DB replies). I expect AirBnB is already unpleasant on such a machine, this won't make it any worse!