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Comment by r_singh | Hacker News Reader

This website loads staggeringly fast (much faster than HN and my own static site which uses Gatsby and is hosted on Cloudfront). What’s the reason for this?

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The whole HTML is likely static, and it has only one <script>, at the very end, that attaches some async update handler to the existing DOM. No wonder it renders instantly.

Modern computers are obnoxiously fast, and so are modern browsers. But modern websites overload them with a sickening amount of processing and network latencies before displaying the content.

It flashes a dark theme for a half a second before switching to light

Served from a service worker after the first load

Served via service worker, but still Cloudflare serves it faster than my very minimalistic static blog. Perhaps it uses paid Cloudflare plan?

Really impressive stuff. Seems to have slowed down slightly now that it's on the front page, but blazing fast when I first opened it.

Interesting. I'm seeing something slower. Pagespeed shows 2.7 seconds:

https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-themer-dev-blog-the...

Even just an eye-test shows it's much faster than that for me.

Pagespeed shows .6 for desktop, but locally I'm seeing frames loaded under 350ms. I would have guessed much faster, but I guess the devtools don't lie.

I think devtools can lie in the sense that it can be slower when devtools is open in some circumstances.

PageSpeed Insights tests on a slow internet connection and an underpowered device

Impressive? This is the default. You have to actively do stuff to make it slower.

You have to actively do stuff to make a house messy, but it can still be impressive when it’s clean.

I find it the opposite. You have to actively clean a house, but do nothing and it won't be clean

"Tidy" may have been a better word than clean.

The natural state of a home is tidy. It was probably empty when the current resident moved in. The natural state of a website is fast. A tiny website can be delivered in one packet.

The home only becomes messy through action. Not intention, but action. Someone has to dirty a dish for there to be dirty dishes. And it's not like you can avoid these activities, that's what a home is for.

It requires a countering action to put things back as they were. So it's action on both sides. Action to make things messy, action to keep things tidy. It's the second action we admire in the tidy home, the fast website.

52ms for me. Pretty standard for an HTML page.

I don't think I've ever seen a page load in 52ms (`load`, not `DOMContentLoaded`) with caching disabled.

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