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Comment by keizo | Hacker News Reader

Speed is the big one for me. 2-6+ seconds is insanity for anything.

Speed is definitely a big one.

I also am glad to see that everyone on the dev team became full stack developers, because I think the back-end/front-end split is often detrimental to development velocity. It's often better when a developer can fully realize an entire feature, with no front-end/back-end friction.

Oh for sure. For me programming is a hobby, so I can only get something made if I do it all.

I hear you, but YouTube takes 6+ seconds for me to load and it does not seem to hold them back. For most, not all, optimizing page load time is time probably best spent elsewhere. This is is no way to impugn htmx, because with htmx you seem to kill many birds with one stone.

Youtube is kind of unique in that nothing (currently) even comes close to replacing it for the average youtube user.

Details matter, as they learned when making things faster made their metrics slower - https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

I would argue that 1-2 seconds is not impressive either.

It's like seeing people breaking rocks with hand tools being impressed with a bigger mallet.

I used to aim for 15 millisecond cold load times, which is apparently unheard of these days even for front pages with entirely static content.

Well yea, but start trimming with the biggest wins first.

15ms to who? I’ve never had that kind of latency on a cold connection. My pages have an LCP of around 600ms, and it’s hard to push it much lower because even static pages on a CDN end up taking 400ms to connect and download.

15 ms to anyone in the same city or on the same local network in an office setting.

50 ms to anyone in the same country, ideally lower.

Global reach is a different problem because of physics.

However, front pages of web pages tend to be largely static and can be staged in various geo-distributed regions. In other words, distributed via a CDN..

> even static pages on a CDN end up taking 400ms to connect and download.

Only if you stuff them full of megabytes of Javascript and pull down megabytes of JSON in order to display that static content.

The fact that my comment -- a factual statement about real-world performance I've achieved regularly -- is voted down and your off-by-an-order-of-magnitude reply is voted up speaks volumes about the state of the industry.

It's like a bunch of fat people being flabbergasted about the mere concept of mountain climbing. With what... your legs!? Up there!? Madness!

My site is a static page hosted on a CDN with less than 80KB of JavaScript.

If you’re testing local network times, you’re just fooling yourself. None of your visitors are seeing that time, so it’s irrelevant.

What’s your URL? I’d love to throw it into webpagetest.org and take a look.

I'm with you on what's impressive and what isn't. I've done considerable work on page load performance engineering in the past, getting times down to the low single-digit milliseconds as you would like while maintaining high traffic levels. I know how to make every part of the system work together to minimise response and rendering latency, which is nice for people with suitably low-latency connections, and for APIs that respond nicely in client-side applications.

Unfortunately, for myself I can't even get a ping response from the ISP upstream router in 15ms, let alone a static page over HTTPS.

None of my internet connections has sufficiently low latency - neither home nor office.

HN takes 400-600ms to load, but that's understandable due to physics. Wrong country.

I just loaded news.bbc.co.uk, which is in my country and is also well connected, and saw that DNS resolution took up to 400ms, and TLS setup took up to 650ms (though not both at the same time in a single request). Total page load time was about 2s.

Those numbers seem unnecessarily high on this connection. But 15ms is too optimistic: the network latency isn't low enough, even for a small static page.

There are a lot of people in a similar situation, living with connection latencies you would consider high, but it's all we can get.

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