The web being slow is a choice (and it's a stupid choice) | Hacker News Reader

The web being slow is a choice (and it's a stupid choice)

albanbrooke.com

2 pointsspeckx5 comments

> U.S. download speeds increased 174% from 2020 to 2024. 5 Gbps is almost 90,000x the bandwidth I had in 1996. So why are we’re still dealing with slow, bloated websites?

Yes, because the web is more bloated now than it ever was, but also because you're conflating latency and throughput. If the server takes multiple seconds to send the first bit of data, no amount of bandwidth will ever get you within the 0.1-second deadline.

Conflating latency and throughput is a surprisingly common error, and at my last job processing sensor data in real time, I had to make a huge effort to convince other people that latency was the performance metric that mattered, much more than throughput.

Thank you, I'm not that technical, but I had the suspicion I was making some type of error like this when I wrote the post. I should go update it with your feedback.

But am I write to think that latency becomes even more of an issue as we bloat pages with 3rd party services. We can load them async, but if one service in the critical path takes a while to respond, it holds up everything.

Yes, and I think that's more likely to be the issue with nytimes.com (from my completely unscientific investigation).

Choice, or incompetence? Or maybe structural incompetence: those who decide what's being built only care about maximising profit, those who know how to build stopped caring because... why would they?

When whoever is in power finds it fine to build such terrible products full of ads, the only thing worth doing is the minimal amount of work required to get your salary, if you ask me.

See also: Wirth's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law)

    Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster

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