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We offer a lot of customization in our product so we can eliminate whole blocks or code if we know the customer doesn't have x turned on. We also have several g

We offer a lot of customization in our product so we can eliminate whole blocks or code if we know the customer doesn't have x turned on. We also have several geo-based products and so we know we don't need to send GDPR-related code to users in the USA for example. The goal is to ship the minimal amount of code to the end-user.

gcr 3y ago
I’d love to poke at this if you don’t mind. One advantage of downloading everything is that you only download it once. If the user is enabling/disabling features, you’ll have to then re-ship a new js bundle, no?
- eddd-ddde 3y ago
  Also my thoughts. With something like Qwik you get tiny chunks that you only download when needed and are highly cacheable. All automated!
  - fastest963 3y ago
    Not impossible for us to use something like that but remember that we are a vendor that sits on customer sites with very limited objectives we aren't powering a full-on webapp or multi-page experience. Typically we want to load our experience/component as quickly as possible after some sort of user interaction and the user interaction might have been from the customer's app/website.
    - eddd-ddde 3y ago
      Ah I see, that makes a lot of sense.
- fastest963 3y ago
  At the scale we operate at we would probably have billions, if not tens or hundreds of billions, of downloads before any feature status is changed. Typically our customers are not turning on and off features very frequently.
vlovich123 3y ago
That still doesn’t explain why you can’t cache. I would think that each code snippet itself is still cacheable. Or do you amalgamate all of them into a single download? Even still, I would expect most users to be fetching the same amalgamation, in which case caching should be beneficial…
- fastest963 3y ago
  We do combine everything into a single file. To clarify, we use browser caching but we can't utilize any traditional CDN because if a customer embeds host.com/js as a JS file that path might be different for user A vs user B.

gcr 3y ago

I’d love to poke at this if you don’t mind. One advantage of downloading everything is that you only download it once. If the user is enabling/disabling features, you’ll have to then re-ship a new js bundle, no?

eddd-ddde 3y ago
Also my thoughts. With something like Qwik you get tiny chunks that you only download when needed and are highly cacheable. All automated!
- fastest963 3y ago
  Not impossible for us to use something like that but remember that we are a vendor that sits on customer sites with very limited objectives we aren't powering a full-on webapp or multi-page experience. Typically we want to load our experience/component as quickly as possible after some sort of user interaction and the user interaction might have been from the customer's app/website.
  - eddd-ddde 3y ago
    Ah I see, that makes a lot of sense.
fastest963 3y ago
At the scale we operate at we would probably have billions, if not tens or hundreds of billions, of downloads before any feature status is changed. Typically our customers are not turning on and off features very frequently.

vlovich123 3y ago

That still doesn’t explain why you can’t cache. I would think that each code snippet itself is still cacheable. Or do you amalgamate all of them into a single download? Even still, I would expect most users to be fetching the same amalgamation, in which case caching should be beneficial…

fastest963 3y ago
We do combine everything into a single file. To clarify, we use browser caching but we can't utilize any traditional CDN because if a customer embeds host.com/js as a JS file that path might be different for user A vs user B.