7 ms·
The overlap of people that don’t know what TCP Slow Start is and those that should care about their website loading a few milliseconds faster is incredibly smal
by 9dev 1y ago
The overlap of people that don’t know what TCP Slow Start is and those that should care about their website loading a few milliseconds faster is incredibly small. A startup should focus on, well, starting up, not performance; a corporation large enough to optimise speed on that level will have a team of experienced SREs that know over which detail to obsess.
- andrepd 1y ago> a corporation large enough will have a team of experienced SREs that know over which detail to obsess. Ahh, if only. Have you seen applications developed by large corporations lately? :)
- achenet 1y agoa corporation large enough to have a team of experienced SREs that know which details to obsess over will also have enough promotion-hungry POs and middle managers to tell them devs to add 50MB of ads and trackers in the web page. Maybe another 100MB for an LLM wrapper too. :)
- hinkley 1y agoDon’t forget adding 25 individual Google Tag Managers to every page.
- elmigranto 1y agoRight. That’s why all the software from, say, Microsoft works flawlessly and at peak efficiency.
- 9dev 1y agoThat’s not what I said. Only that the responsible engineers know which tradeoffs they make, and are competent enough to do so.
- samrus 1y agoThe decision to use react for the start menu wasnt out of competency. The guy said on twitter that thats what he knew so he used it [1]. Didnt think twice. Head empty no thoughts 1 https://x.com/philtrem22/status/1927161666732523596 https://x.com/philtrem22/status/1927161666732523596
- ldjb 1y agoPlease do share any evidence to the contrary, but it seems that the Tweet is not serious and is not from someone who worked on the Start Menu.
- bool3max 1y agoNo way people on HN are falling for bait Tweets. We're cooked
- mort96 1y agoI found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMJNEFHj8b8&t=287s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMJNEFHj8b8&t=287s I googled the names of the people holding the talk and they're both employed by Microsoft as software engineers, I don't see any reason to doubt what they're presenting. Not the whole start menu is React Native, but parts are.
- hinkley 1y agoWhy is that somehow worse?
- fsh 1y agoIt is indeed an impressive feat of engineering to make the start menu take several seconds to launch in the age of 5 GHz many-core CPUs, unlimited RAM, and multi-GByte/s SSDs. As an added bonus, I now have to re-boot every couple of days or the search function stops working completely.
- the_real_cher 1y ago
- SXX 1y agoThis. It's exactly why Microsoft use modern frameworks such as React Native for their Start Menu used by billions of people every day.
- Nab443 1y agoAnd probably the reason why I have to restart it at least twice a week.
- chamomeal 1y agoWait… please please tell me this is a weirdly specific joke
- kevindamm 1y agoOnly certain live portions of it, and calling it React is a stretch but not entirely wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688#:~:text=Just%20the%20%E2%80%9CRecommended%E2%80%9D%20section%20%2D,JS%2Dbacked%20React%20Native%20app. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688#:~:text=Just%2... the notion was popularized as an explanation for a CPU core spiking whenever the start menu opens on Win11
- hinkley 1y agoAnd this is why SteamOS is absolutely kicking Windows’ ass on handhelds.
- wiseowise 1y agoWhy? Because they use web based UI that is even worse than RN, according to church of native fanatics?
- hinkley 1y agoBattery and frame rate. There are a couple SteamOS boxes that have windows variants and the windows version is bad. Microsoft has been trying to manage the PR on this, last I heard they claimed the next update would have 2 GB more available memory. 2GB is not good news. That’s evidence that they did not give two shits about mobile before the bad press.
- nasso_dev 1y agoI agree, it feels like it should be how you describe it. But if Evan Wallace didn't obsess over performance when building Figma, it wouldn't be what it is today. Sometimes, performance is a feature.
- austin-cheney 1y agoI don’t see what size of corporation has to do with performance or optimization. Almost never do I see larger businesses doing anything to execute more quickly online.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoToo many cooks spoil the broth. If you got multiple people pushing agenda to use their favorite new JS framework, disregarding simplicity in order to chase some imaginary goal or hip thing to bolster their CV, it's not gonna end well.
- anymouse123456 1y agoThis idea that performance is irrelevant gets under my skin. It's how we ended up with Docker and Kubernetes and the absolute slop stack that is destroying everything it touches. Performance matters. We've spent so many decades misinterpreting Knuth's quote about optimization that we've managed to chew up 5-6 orders of magnitude in hardware performance gains and still deliver slow, bloated and defective software products. Performance does in fact matter and all other things equal, a fast product is more pleasurable than a slow one. Thankfully some people like the folks at Figma took the risk and proved the point. Even if we're innovating on hard technical problems (which most of us are not), performance still matters.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoPerformance matters, but at least initially only as far as it doesn't complicate your code significantly. That's why a simple static website often beats some hyper modern latest framework optimization journey websites. You gotta maintain that shit. And you are making sacrifices elsewhere, in the areas of accessibility and possibly privacy and possibly ethics. So yeah, make sure not to lose performance unreasonably, but also don't obsess with performance to the point of making things unusable or way too complicated for what they do.
- sgarland 1y ago> way too complicated for what they do Notably, this is subjective. I’ve had devs tell me that joins (in SQL) are too complicated, so they’d prefer to just duplicate data everywhere. I get that skill is a spectrum, but it’s getting to the point where I feel like we’ve passed the floor, and need to firmly state that there are in fact some basic ideas that are required knowledge.
- anymouse123456 1y agoThis kind of thinking is exactly the problem. Yes, at the most absurd limits, some autists may occasionally obsess and make things worse. We're so far from that problem today, it would be a good one to have. IME, making things fast almost always also makes them simpler and easier to understand. Building high-performance software often means building less of it, which translates into simpler concepts, fewer abstractions, and shorter times to execution. It's not a trade-off, it's valuable all the way down. Treating high performance as a feature and low performance as a bug impacts everything we do and ignoring them for decades is how you get the rivers of garbage we're swimming in.
- jeroenhd 1y agoWhen your approach is "I don't care because I have more important things to focus on", you never care. There's always something you can do that's more important to a company than optimising the page load to align with the TCP window size used to access your server. This is why almost all applications and websites are slow and terrible these days.
- keysdev 1y agoThat and SPA
- andix 1y agoSPAs are great for highly interactive pages. Something like a mail client. It's fine if it takes 2-3 seconds extra when opening the SPA, it's much more important to have instant feedback when navigating. SPAs are really bad for mostly static websites. News sites, documentation, blogs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sgarland 1y agoThis. A million times this. Performance isn’t seen as sexy, for reasons I don’t understand. Devs will be agog about how McMaster-Carr manages to make a usable and incredibly fast site, but they don’t put that same energy back into their own work. People like responsive applications - you can’t tell me you’ve never seen a non-tech person frustratingly tapping their screen repeatedly because something is slow.
- marcosdumay 1y agoWell, half of a second is a small difference. So yeah, there will probably be better things to work on up to the point when you have people working exclusively on your site. > This is why almost all applications and websites are slow and terrible these days. But no, there are way more things broken on the web than lack of overoptimization.
- exiguus 1y agoI think, this is just an Art project.
- andersmurphy 1y agoDoesn’t have to be a choice it could just be the default. My billion cells/checkboxes[1] demos both use datastar and so are just over 10kb. It can make a big difference on mobile networks and 3G. I did my own tests and being over 14kb often meant an extra 3s load time on bad connections. The nice thing is I got this for free because the datastar maintainer cares about tcp slow star even though I might not. - [1] https://checkboxes.andersmurphy.com https://checkboxes.andersmurphy.com
- CyberDildonics 1y agoIf you make something that, well, wastes my time because you feel it is, well, not important, then, well, I don't want to use it.
- sgarland 1y agoDepending on the physical distance, it can be much more than a few msec, as TFA discusses.