3 ms·

Facebook makes over 300 requests for me just loading the main logged in page while showing me exactly 1 timeline item. Hovering my mouse over that item makes an

Facebook makes over 300 requests for me just loading the main logged in page while showing me exactly 1 timeline item. Hovering my mouse over that item makes another 100 requests or so. Scrolling down loads another item at the cost of over 100 requests again. It's impressive in a perverse way just how inefficient they can be while managing to make it still work, and somewhat disturbing that their ads bring in enough money to make them extremely profitable despite it.

golergka 3y ago
Wasn't the whole point of GraphQL in mitigating this?
- serial_dev 3y ago
  Yeah, that's why you have only 100 requests* when you hover over an item instead of 800. (* allegedly, didn't verify it myself)
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  No. Here is the thing, hypermedia is cacheable. React/Graphql not so much. Facebook is now just an application that runs in the browser. As a poor, small developer who doesn't want to hemorrhage money, I tend to want things to be more hypermedia and less app. It saves on complexity and bandwidth and costs.
yodsanklai 3y ago
Could someone tell me what these hundreds of requests could do?
- Solvency 3y ago
  Track you, probably with a thousand layers of redundancy, tech bloat, and decades of mold.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  A lot of them appear to be that they've split their javascript into a gazillion files for whatever reason (I suppose because they have several MB of it). But someone or lots of people there did seem to get addicted to dynamic loading. Like I've got 100 or so friends, but my friends page loads them 8-16 at a time as I scroll. Just send all 100 and set the profile pictures to deferred fetch. It'd probably be smaller than the js they have to make it do "infinite" scroll. Similarly, after getting to the bottom of their "infinite" scroll, my friend feed (which is annoyingly hidden away) gives me... 15 items. Just send me all 15. It's like 1-2 kB worth of data. If you're going to end the scroll after a dozen items, why is it using infinite scroll?
  - sd9 3y ago
    Could be so they can track what you're looking at on the back end
akira2501 3y ago
This is the company that instead of ditching PHP created a full on PHP to C++ transpiler and then deployed their while site on that for a few years.
- theptip 3y ago
  FB still runs on Hack.
- NooneAtAll3 3y ago
  > deployed their while site ??
  - kqr 3y ago
    Obviously "whole".
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    That's why it's so inefficient!
callalex 3y ago
Do you have an ad blocker stopping the requests and causing retries?
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  I do have ublock origin on everything of mine, so conceivably it's reacting to that somehow. I'm no longer at my computer to be able to look more closely at what it's doing.
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    Whenever you're running this kind of eyeball test with DevTools, make sure the "Disable Cache" option is _not_ checked. And even then, make sure the requests you're counting were not served from your browser cache. It's possible that only the first page load sends hundreds of requests, and subsequent loads may still initiate those requests, but have their responses served from your browser cache (or your cache is disabled). I would check myself, but I haven't logged into Facebook in many years. :)

golergka 3y ago

Wasn't the whole point of GraphQL in mitigating this?

serial_dev 3y ago
Yeah, that's why you have only 100 requests* when you hover over an item instead of 800. (* allegedly, didn't verify it myself)
zer00eyz 3y ago
No. Here is the thing, hypermedia is cacheable. React/Graphql not so much. Facebook is now just an application that runs in the browser. As a poor, small developer who doesn't want to hemorrhage money, I tend to want things to be more hypermedia and less app. It saves on complexity and bandwidth and costs.

yodsanklai 3y ago

Could someone tell me what these hundreds of requests could do?

Solvency 3y ago
Track you, probably with a thousand layers of redundancy, tech bloat, and decades of mold.
ndriscoll 3y ago
A lot of them appear to be that they've split their javascript into a gazillion files for whatever reason (I suppose because they have several MB of it). But someone or lots of people there did seem to get addicted to dynamic loading. Like I've got 100 or so friends, but my friends page loads them 8-16 at a time as I scroll. Just send all 100 and set the profile pictures to deferred fetch. It'd probably be smaller than the js they have to make it do "infinite" scroll. Similarly, after getting to the bottom of their "infinite" scroll, my friend feed (which is annoyingly hidden away) gives me... 15 items. Just send me all 15. It's like 1-2 kB worth of data. If you're going to end the scroll after a dozen items, why is it using infinite scroll?
- sd9 3y ago
  Could be so they can track what you're looking at on the back end

akira2501 3y ago

This is the company that instead of ditching PHP created a full on PHP to C++ transpiler and then deployed their while site on that for a few years.

theptip 3y ago
FB still runs on Hack.
NooneAtAll3 3y ago
> deployed their while site ??
- kqr 3y ago
  Obviously "whole".
- saagarjha 3y ago
  That's why it's so inefficient!

callalex 3y ago

Do you have an ad blocker stopping the requests and causing retries?

ndriscoll 3y ago
I do have ublock origin on everything of mine, so conceivably it's reacting to that somehow. I'm no longer at my computer to be able to look more closely at what it's doing.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  Whenever you're running this kind of eyeball test with DevTools, make sure the "Disable Cache" option is _not_ checked. And even then, make sure the requests you're counting were not served from your browser cache. It's possible that only the first page load sends hundreds of requests, and subsequent loads may still initiate those requests, but have their responses served from your browser cache (or your cache is disabled). I would check myself, but I haven't logged into Facebook in many years. :)