5 ms·

HN front page isn't filled with garbage and loaded with a million lines of pointless javascript like all other sites you mentioned. HN front page is 27 kb in si

by vjk800 3y ago

HN front page isn't filled with garbage and loaded with a million lines of pointless javascript like all other sites you mentioned. HN front page is 27 kb in size while, for example, reddit is 943 kb. Performance issues with websites are entirely a self-made problem. There are plenty of fast, lean and yet very functional web pages like HN that prove that prove it.

yuuuuuuuu 3y ago
That's exactly GP's point, right? No matter us-east-1 or not, what makes things slow has nothing to do with DC location. That latency is insignificant.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  HN takes - when fully cached, where it only takes 1 request - ~200ms to load, so 3/4ths of the pageload is just the roundtrip. HN user experience in EU is "meh" because HN is one of the fastest loading dynamic pages on the web to load, meant to give you whiplash from the load speed. Not all pages can load with 1 request, even when designed well, so they will be sub-"meh". HN, if hosted in EU, would have gotten a "daaang" rating.
  - TacticalCoder 3y ago
    > HN user experience in EU is "meh" It's not: it's super quick, the fastest website I check on a daily basis, by very far. If only all the web could be like this! Which is user tekmol 's point: "Hacker News is one of the most responsive websites I know. And it is run on a single server somewhere in the USA. While I am in Europe." HN is great in the EU. If most of the pageloading is just the roundtrip, you've already won, no matter if your users are on the same continent as your unique server or not.
    - arghwhat 3y ago
      I disagree, but that does not matter - even if you think it is fast somewhere in the EU, the fact still holds that your perceived loading time is in the ballpark of 2-3x longer than it would have been if hosted within the EU. How you grade those experiences is subjective. Your "great" is likely my "meh", as physics dictate that we see similar results.
    - zo1 3y ago
      I'm on another hemisphere, diff continent (Africa) and closeish to the south pole. And even for me HN is very fast.
  - yuuuuuuuu 3y ago
    I think you are missin the point. The typical website is so bloated that a latency of a single roundtrip is not the root cause. They may load quicker if roundtrips are faster, but that's then mainly because they make too many roundtrips. That it makes a significant difference for HN (as in: "measurable") is because HN is so snappy in the first place. Apart from that, being located in Europe, I agree with the other posters that claiming HN being "meh" in Europe is just nonsense. It's one of the quickest websites you can come across on this planet. Anywhere on the planet.
    - arghwhat 3y ago
      Latency of a single roundtrip is the sole reason for the bloat being an issue. The bandwidth requirements to load even the heaviest webpages at a few megabytes is negligible for most people, but these pages are slow to load even in gigabit connections exactly due to their many render-blocking round-trips chained together.
cbzoiav 3y ago
Size isn't even the worst of it. It's number of requests. You need to go through a TCP handshake for every connection you open. You can reuse the connection but that means queuing requests and hitting the latency as a multiplier. Browsers also have a cap on parallel connections so when you get enough requests it queues either way. HTTP/2 reduces the problem with multiplexing but it still doesn't go away. If your app has to make 40 requests pulling in js files, CSS files fonts, API calls etc. to show something useful that will be visibly slow the moment a user is out of region. If it's a single server rendered piece of html it's a single request. Then for real fun be in an enterprise environment with Kerberos Auth adding a load more round trips to the server. For even more fun add in a mobile browsing solution that only has ingress in a far region when the site is hosted locally!
- bruce511 3y ago
  >> has to make 40 requests pulling in js files, CSS files fonts So it's 2023 and I've been concatenation all my css, and all my js, into a single css and js request since like 2005. So a call to the site results in maybe 3 or 4 requests, not 40. But I've noticed most sites don't do this. Perhaps because I was trained when we had 28k modems not 100mb fibre? Http/2 makes a big deal of multiplexing, but its less convincing when there are only 3 connections already. I guess I also don't have a million separate image files, or ads etc so that likely helps.
  - jefozabuss 3y ago
    Modules are widely supported now for js which means you could have 100 modules = 100 files instead of 1 bundle of 100 modules = 1 file, obviously this is not "the most ideal" but it allows you to skip a build step. There are also frameworks like Astro that splits your pages into tiny pieces so there are definitely some ways to add a lot of requests
  - jaggederest 3y ago
    Remember back in the old days when people used to concatenate images into imagemaps and specify the coordinates and dimensions? One image file for a whole site. Same goes back when we could just load a single library from the Google public version (cough-jquery-cough) and then all the on-page JS was just in-tag handlers. Not that it was better but boy howdy was it faster to load.
nottorp 3y ago
Q1: Why would round trip latency matter so much when the modern web 45.0 adds so much overhead? Q2: Why don't we just force all the SV techbros to test their sites - AND their browsers - on a $200 notebook with eMMC storage from 2 years ago?
- noitpmeder 3y ago
  Because most sites aren't interested in their users who use bad hardware as a market share. The most attractive client base are the ones with money to spend.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Fair point, but even high end users have bad connection sometimes.
  - est31 3y ago
    Rich people tend to be old, and not all, but many old people have bad hardware, even if they are rich. Meanwhile, 87% of US teenagers have iPhones.
- strken 3y ago
  It matters a lot. I just spent three days on a 130kbps 1000+ms latency high packet loss connection, and RTT was one of the problems that made lots of sites I tried (practically) unusable, due to launching dependent queries in series without any retries. The other big one was gigantic interaction-blocking assets served from CDNs with aggressive timeouts. SV techbros are a fun pinata to smash, but that's a load of bullshit intended to conflate individual workers (easily hateable and zero power to fix anything) with ad-tech/paywalls/lead acquisition/overoptimisation driven by profit-seeking (too diffuse to hate, too little understood for lawmakers to regulate effectively...yet), and make slow websites seem like a technical or competency problem instead of an auctioning-your-eyeballs-and-spamming-you-with-modals.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Pretty sure the guilt is shared. The profit seeking personal data peddlers don't choose overengineered solutions that only make sense at google scale. I also have a feeling hardware designers could use being forced to live somewhere that's not a dust less constant temperature air conditioned office in California, but that's another matter for a different rant.
dr-detroit 3y ago
[dead]

by vjk800 3y ago

yuuuuuuuu 3y ago

That's exactly GP's point, right? No matter us-east-1 or not, what makes things slow has nothing to do with DC location. That latency is insignificant.

arghwhat 3y ago
HN takes - when fully cached, where it only takes 1 request - ~200ms to load, so 3/4ths of the pageload is just the roundtrip. HN user experience in EU is "meh" because HN is one of the fastest loading dynamic pages on the web to load, meant to give you whiplash from the load speed. Not all pages can load with 1 request, even when designed well, so they will be sub-"meh". HN, if hosted in EU, would have gotten a "daaang" rating.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > HN user experience in EU is "meh" It's not: it's super quick, the fastest website I check on a daily basis, by very far. If only all the web could be like this! Which is user tekmol 's point: "Hacker News is one of the most responsive websites I know. And it is run on a single server somewhere in the USA. While I am in Europe." HN is great in the EU. If most of the pageloading is just the roundtrip, you've already won, no matter if your users are on the same continent as your unique server or not.
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    I disagree, but that does not matter - even if you think it is fast somewhere in the EU, the fact still holds that your perceived loading time is in the ballpark of 2-3x longer than it would have been if hosted within the EU. How you grade those experiences is subjective. Your "great" is likely my "meh", as physics dictate that we see similar results.
  - zo1 3y ago
    I'm on another hemisphere, diff continent (Africa) and closeish to the south pole. And even for me HN is very fast.
- yuuuuuuuu 3y ago
  I think you are missin the point. The typical website is so bloated that a latency of a single roundtrip is not the root cause. They may load quicker if roundtrips are faster, but that's then mainly because they make too many roundtrips. That it makes a significant difference for HN (as in: "measurable") is because HN is so snappy in the first place. Apart from that, being located in Europe, I agree with the other posters that claiming HN being "meh" in Europe is just nonsense. It's one of the quickest websites you can come across on this planet. Anywhere on the planet.
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    Latency of a single roundtrip is the sole reason for the bloat being an issue. The bandwidth requirements to load even the heaviest webpages at a few megabytes is negligible for most people, but these pages are slow to load even in gigabit connections exactly due to their many render-blocking round-trips chained together.

cbzoiav 3y ago

Size isn't even the worst of it. It's number of requests. You need to go through a TCP handshake for every connection you open. You can reuse the connection but that means queuing requests and hitting the latency as a multiplier. Browsers also have a cap on parallel connections so when you get enough requests it queues either way. HTTP/2 reduces the problem with multiplexing but it still doesn't go away. If your app has to make 40 requests pulling in js files, CSS files fonts, API calls etc. to show something useful that will be visibly slow the moment a user is out of region. If it's a single server rendered piece of html it's a single request. Then for real fun be in an enterprise environment with Kerberos Auth adding a load more round trips to the server. For even more fun add in a mobile browsing solution that only has ingress in a far region when the site is hosted locally!

bruce511 3y ago
>> has to make 40 requests pulling in js files, CSS files fonts So it's 2023 and I've been concatenation all my css, and all my js, into a single css and js request since like 2005. So a call to the site results in maybe 3 or 4 requests, not 40. But I've noticed most sites don't do this. Perhaps because I was trained when we had 28k modems not 100mb fibre? Http/2 makes a big deal of multiplexing, but its less convincing when there are only 3 connections already. I guess I also don't have a million separate image files, or ads etc so that likely helps.
- jefozabuss 3y ago
  Modules are widely supported now for js which means you could have 100 modules = 100 files instead of 1 bundle of 100 modules = 1 file, obviously this is not "the most ideal" but it allows you to skip a build step. There are also frameworks like Astro that splits your pages into tiny pieces so there are definitely some ways to add a lot of requests
- jaggederest 3y ago
  Remember back in the old days when people used to concatenate images into imagemaps and specify the coordinates and dimensions? One image file for a whole site. Same goes back when we could just load a single library from the Google public version (cough-jquery-cough) and then all the on-page JS was just in-tag handlers. Not that it was better but boy howdy was it faster to load.

nottorp 3y ago

Q1: Why would round trip latency matter so much when the modern web 45.0 adds so much overhead? Q2: Why don't we just force all the SV techbros to test their sites - AND their browsers - on a $200 notebook with eMMC storage from 2 years ago?

noitpmeder 3y ago
Because most sites aren't interested in their users who use bad hardware as a market share. The most attractive client base are the ones with money to spend.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Fair point, but even high end users have bad connection sometimes.
- est31 3y ago
  Rich people tend to be old, and not all, but many old people have bad hardware, even if they are rich. Meanwhile, 87% of US teenagers have iPhones.
strken 3y ago
It matters a lot. I just spent three days on a 130kbps 1000+ms latency high packet loss connection, and RTT was one of the problems that made lots of sites I tried (practically) unusable, due to launching dependent queries in series without any retries. The other big one was gigantic interaction-blocking assets served from CDNs with aggressive timeouts. SV techbros are a fun pinata to smash, but that's a load of bullshit intended to conflate individual workers (easily hateable and zero power to fix anything) with ad-tech/paywalls/lead acquisition/overoptimisation driven by profit-seeking (too diffuse to hate, too little understood for lawmakers to regulate effectively...yet), and make slow websites seem like a technical or competency problem instead of an auctioning-your-eyeballs-and-spamming-you-with-modals.
- nottorp 3y ago
  Pretty sure the guilt is shared. The profit seeking personal data peddlers don't choose overengineered solutions that only make sense at google scale. I also have a feeling hardware designers could use being forced to live somewhere that's not a dust less constant temperature air conditioned office in California, but that's another matter for a different rant.

dr-detroit 3y ago

[dead]