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Also, hot take: users care way less about performance than you think. They want "fast enough", but we're over-indexing on "as fast as possible" instead of caring about other things that matter more to users.
Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidKPiano/status/15787403709971...
Show me a slow site and most of the time it's still the server holding it back on old hardware.
I was with you but mostly it really isn't hardware.
Mostly it's missing database indexes, n queries instead of a join, and sometimes just one small piece of code that's doing something very inefficiently on every request.
Solid research on this exists, so there is not much to deny, at least when your goal is selling to the average user.
But: where is this magical place where people put heavy emphasis on performance? It certainly isn't here, and I would like to visit it for once. Companies caring, or giving their programmer the time to care, about performance are absolutely a rare sight. Unless they work in areas in which they are forced to care about it, and even then many stick to the minimum.
Snappy, low latency software is such a delight to encounter because it is just so damn rare. Especially on the web, I constantly feel like I'm wading through molasses, and the only reason I am able to endure this constant, agonizing pain is that I've gotten so used to it...
You need to try hard to build a slow desktop app (using native libraries). There're some simple rules to follow if you want a snappy desktop app (like running heavy or I/O tasks in a separate thread). If your app is huge (like MS word), it might be slow, but that's another level of the problem.
There're no simple rules if you want to build a snappy web app. You need to think about performance on all levels. You need to think about TLS handshake. Does your certificate fits into first TCP packet? Does your entire conversation fits into first ten TCP packets? That's hard stuff. Is your CSS layout fast enough? Did you think about every resource your website uses?
That's just an observation. I don't know what to do. I don't even know how would I make it better. Web stack is mostly reasonable. Sometimes web stack goes to great lengths in pursue of performance, like replacing TCP with QUIC. That's huge technical accomplishment. WebAssembly is pretty fast for a sandboxed VM. JS is crazy fast for a dynamic language. Yet some startup webapp will make 60 HTTP queries on its first page and that's considered a norm.
Absolutely, still there is "normal web latency" slow, "regular website" slow and then there is "reddit redesign" (and other popular sites) slow. Taking the latter as an example, it is easy to check how much faster it could be by using old.reddit.com instead.
For that type of slowness I have very little understanding, it's just a regression.
Somewhat counter-intuitively to some: this way if thinking can actually make things needlessly less responsive for the individual users because of the "over-architecting" it can cause.
Also: for regular sites, html/css/js optimization is less important than server location. If your server is in Europe and your user is in the US, that's the big one, not your HTML, CSS or JS.
And if you're fetishizing over Lighthouse scores, stop. It's only a very rough measure and shouldn't be treated as a goal itself.
EDIT max ping of each of our recurring American users on websockets, about a thousand of them. No difference in usage pattern there between Europe and US, but sure we do not have many that have worse ping.
Lighthouse is a synthetic testing tool. It can be incredibly useful when you connect it to your CI build process and track scores over time – revealing how code changes affect (some) front-end performance metrics.[0] Of course, some scores are non-deterministic so you'll need to run it multiple times.[1] And you should be tracking real user data as well to validate it.
Using PageSpeed Insights to benchmark a site is akin to loading your website a single time on a single device and saying "wow, my site is slow"
Using Lighthouse in your browser to benchmark a site is akin to wasting your time.
[0] https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse-ci
[1] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/variabili...
But if you are implying that the web today is fast enough that for sure is a hot take. Our industry most certainly don't care the slightest about performance nor user experience.
Popups alone are proof of that.