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Comment by mhoad | Hacker News Reader

For all of its marketing hype, Next is actually kind of dogshit when it comes to performance especially compared to something like Astro

https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2022/mobile-performance-of-n...

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And this is why we don't let people with absolutely no knowledge on benchmarking do benchmarks. This isn't measuring Next.js's performance, it's measuring the performance of sites that use Next.js. I could run my website on a bare metal server with a custom made, SIMD compatible, Assembly-written web server that only returns contents.html, if contents.html is 45MB including 32MB of tracking JS that has to run synchronously, my performance is going to be dogshit.

Proper benchmarks of Next would come from using the exact same site setup, the exact same resources served and comparing various sizes and complexities against other tools.

And I say this as a notorious Next.js (actually, *.js) hater.

Strong disagree on this one. We are talking about the difference between theoretical performance (what you COULD do) vs performance in reality (this is a dataset that measures all the various nextjs websites across the web and then compares them along well established benchmarks against the rest of the internet across time).

One of those two things is infinitely more valuable than the other.

So, if I were to make a website using Next.js that looks like, say, Tiktok but runs fast, would you take this as a positive point for Next ?

Or more simply: compare this to any other website using any other framework. Do you see similar trends ? Are they websites of the same complexity ? If so, why is your initial data set an indictment of Next.js, but not simply of the lack of care most web developers put in nowadays, coupled with "business needs" (read: Google Analytics) ?

The issue with "out in the wild performance" is that in the web world you will be reliant on 3rd party scripts which 9/10 times are not written to take advantage of some framework specific feature (since it'll most likely be written for under the hood functionality like tracking).

Instead it's better to do synthetic tests and then deduce which performance metric is important for my website.

This is why you are comparing it against every other site in the same situation. At the end of the day based on the data it’s entirely fair to say Next is not a framework known for producing anything other than substantially below average outcomes when it comes to performance.

thanks. from my experience performance is tricky at best of times.

what about APIs, rendering engines, technology stack, replacement for next/image… the juicy stuff…

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