Hacker News Reader

Comment by syrusakbary | Hacker News Reader

Note that it will download around ~300Mb of data directly to your browser, so it might take a bit to load from slow connections.

Here's the related video from FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lotech_lowa/

View on HN

300 MiB. & … "a bit" — it takes nearly 20 seconds on "Gigabit" fiber. (312 MiB in 19.22s, or 136 Mbps.)

Runs shockingly smoothly once it starts, though.

Funny, it took me approximately triple the time on a 60 Mbps connection. Makes me wonder if its throttled from source due to a network overload.

yeah, 300mb is not nothing but also not that much. Using full speed it shouldn't take that long.

Progress bar would be nice, without these comments I would have no idea whether to wait or not thinking that maybe it got stuck in a loop downloading the same thing over and over again or something.

when i built my webapp with tons of packages, i tried to figure out if we could hook into the browser, but theres really no way that i found, my solutioj was to just make webpack split the bundles into chunks then have them announce themselves and a loading screen would tally

Haven't explored higher-up pages. Eventually, would be nice if there were a way to download everything to one directory and run offline. Is this only a demo for now?

> Runs shockingly smoothly once it starts, though.

On what hardware? I've got a 2019 MacBook Pro with i9 and 32 GB of RAM, and there's a noticable delay (I'd guess 200~400-ish miliseconds) when clicking any elements with Firefox or Chrome.

Works fine on my current work windows laptop, 16gb ram with some budget low electricity use processor.

Probably just apple not supporting anything web related as usual.

> Probably just apple not supporting anything web related as usual.

The comment you’re replying to specifically mentioned Firefox and Chrome, no mention of Safari.

Same on a very beefy desktop Windows system.

It runs smoothly for me when zoomed out but when you zoom in on a page it starts to lag. Nevertheless its quite amazing to see LibreOffice running in the browser.

"its quite amazing to see LibreOffice running in the browser"

You should see jslinux:

https://bellard.org/jslinux/

Running on an M1 Max and getting 5-10 fps. Not what i'd call smooth.

The sad part is, it could be cut very easily cut down to ~60MB with basic optimization & compression (heck, even gzip/brotli compression alone would go a long way): https://twitter.com/RReverser/status/1494435774003093515

Impressive feat, but I'm worried this small detail ruins the first impression for way too many.

Damn, you are 100% on point. I assumed it already had the optimizations applied and it was big just because of the nature of the app.

Once they get their server bill perhaps they will reconsider optimizing it!

Even with a fast connection, it takes a very long time. I'm guessing the site is overloaded as the peak was a few tens of Mb/s, and generally much slower.

Makes me wonder if it is possible/usefull to make the download a two step process, first download a small wasm bittorrent client, then use it to download (and share) the 300mb file.

Webtorrent already exists, and does not require wasm.

https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

Could WebRTC be used directly here?

Or it could apply gzip/brotli + optionally wasm-opt and cut the size ~5-6x: https://twitter.com/RReverser/status/1494435774003093515

It took about 20s for me, with the fans spinning up around halfway through. Once loaded it feels fairly usable, considering...

Does make you wonder what other optimization can be done. Maybe the whole thing doesn't have to be loaded in immediately.

Such lazy loading might be difficult to retrofit into an application designed for an environment where it can load a lot from disk to RAM quickly and has never (IME) been well design in terms of such resource use.

Some lazy loading could probably be done relatively easily where OO does on-demand load libraries, but that would significantly resource apparent in-use performance if truly done live so you'd want to background load the optional parts once the immediately needed ones are done.

I'm guessing that this is a straight compile to WASM with the minimal changes needed to things that would otherwise break completely in the different environment.

Autodesk has shared some information about how they solved this when building AutoCAD Web, which is a wasm app derived from their desktop codebase.

Video: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/autocad-webassembly/

And it's throttled too, took me ~8 min on a 400mbps connection to download those 300mb of data.

And it doesn't cache the download either, so refreshing the page forces you to download the entire thing again.

took me < 35s on a 300mbps connection from europe.

Appreciate the warning for those of us on non-wired connections!

Might be worth changing the link from the direct link to this video, given that 300 megs question.

took me 2 hours to load... LOL

Reply on news.ycombinator.com