28 ms·

Ask HN: Why are not all websites as fast as HN?

1 points by revskill 12y ago

ljk 12y ago
Probably because HN only has text
cpt1138 12y ago
and no trackers
MichaelCrawford 12y ago
web analytics is a significant factor. The easiest way to see this is to open the Activity window in an old version of Safari. A real old version. You could also look at proxy logs, or maybe dump the history from firefox into a text file. If you visit a slow site, actually your typical commercial website, you will commonly find that it is serves at least one single-pixel gif that is either transparent or that matches its background. Sometimes I see one-pixel javascript, uh, "sources". That wouldn't be so bad but their URIs are huge, long and full of query parameters. For reasons that don't make a whole lot of sense, quite commonly I find dozens of these web bugs. Back when they were called web bugs, the public was outraged. But now that we call them "analytics", everyone thinks they are the cats meow. Put these in your /etc/hosts file; if you use windows it has a hosts file to but I don't recall the path: 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com most disturbing to me is that many sites offer free documents, such as adobe web fonts, emoji, graphic buttons and the like. It costs adobe a lot of money to give its entire font catalog away absolutely free of charge. But a few years back, adobe acquired an analytics service. Those analytics servers occupy entire data centers. They are expensive to outfit, to operate, consume prodigious amounts of electricity, but to use their SDK, and to get an analytics report on your site is typically free of charge. Someone is paying a lot of money to serve those one-byte whitespace javascripts. I don't want those mother fuckers following me around. Thanks for letting me clear all that up.
cvs268 12y ago
Can anyone comment on the details of the back-end hw/sw used to run HN? Also will be quite interesting to read a post on any issues/outages and how it was fixed... (though i cannot recall HN being down or slow for as long as i can remember)
- andrewchambers 12y ago
  HN goes down quite often if you browse enough ;)
blt 12y ago
some web developers are more interested in slick effects than performance. some direct their effort toward experimenting with new technology instead of fine-tuning existing technology. some do not understand performance issues well enough to prevent them. some have a boss or client who asked for a feature that degrades performance. the union of those groups: almost all web developers.

1 points by revskill 12y ago

ljk 12y ago

Probably because HN only has text

cpt1138 12y ago

and no trackers

MichaelCrawford 12y ago

web analytics is a significant factor. The easiest way to see this is to open the Activity window in an old version of Safari. A real old version. You could also look at proxy logs, or maybe dump the history from firefox into a text file. If you visit a slow site, actually your typical commercial website, you will commonly find that it is serves at least one single-pixel gif that is either transparent or that matches its background. Sometimes I see one-pixel javascript, uh, "sources". That wouldn't be so bad but their URIs are huge, long and full of query parameters. For reasons that don't make a whole lot of sense, quite commonly I find dozens of these web bugs. Back when they were called web bugs, the public was outraged. But now that we call them "analytics", everyone thinks they are the cats meow. Put these in your /etc/hosts file; if you use windows it has a hosts file to but I don't recall the path: 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com most disturbing to me is that many sites offer free documents, such as adobe web fonts, emoji, graphic buttons and the like. It costs adobe a lot of money to give its entire font catalog away absolutely free of charge. But a few years back, adobe acquired an analytics service. Those analytics servers occupy entire data centers. They are expensive to outfit, to operate, consume prodigious amounts of electricity, but to use their SDK, and to get an analytics report on your site is typically free of charge. Someone is paying a lot of money to serve those one-byte whitespace javascripts. I don't want those mother fuckers following me around. Thanks for letting me clear all that up.

cvs268 12y ago

Can anyone comment on the details of the back-end hw/sw used to run HN? Also will be quite interesting to read a post on any issues/outages and how it was fixed... (though i cannot recall HN being down or slow for as long as i can remember)

andrewchambers 12y ago
HN goes down quite often if you browse enough ;)

blt 12y ago

some web developers are more interested in slick effects than performance. some direct their effort toward experimenting with new technology instead of fine-tuning existing technology. some do not understand performance issues well enough to prevent them. some have a boss or client who asked for a feature that degrades performance. the union of those groups: almost all web developers.