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Comment by zobzu | Hacker News Reader

I much prefer those simple pages. Load fast, display fast, no distraction. A little bit like HN.. except for the load fast part :P

View on HN

Only 4KB!

It made me look - the front page of HN is currently 7.8KB, and this is:

    - 1.6% of yahoo.com size (477KB)
    - 18.9% of reddit.com size (41.2 KB)
    - 23.6% of stackoverflow.com size (33KB)

and

    - 108.3% of gmail.com size (7.2KB)
    - 520% of google.com size (1.5KB)
    - 866.6% of your blog post size (908B)

so this gives some perspective.

edit: the most surprising is gmail.com for me, id have thought they load tons of js in the background. but maybe so does hn?

How did you do these measurements? I would be shocked if the entire gmail webapp is 7.2KB.

Just looking at the Network tab in Chrome's inspector, I see a lot more than 7KB being transferred. It seems the main page on gmail is just loading the other j.s. files.

Same as you, even on disabled cache its about the same, thats why I was surprised.

edit: OK so in Incognito Mode i got 17KB which is a bit more believable, but why doesnt it show that in normal mode with disabled cache?

When I use incognito mode, I see about 200k of Javascript. I wonder why we're getting different sizes.

The largest file I see is the ?shva=1 /mail/u/0 file, clocking in at 173KB.

Still an order of magnitude faster than Reddit. Maybe I'm just a noob at programming and scaling, but after all the engineers Reddit hires, how are they still so slow and crashing?

Isn't the Reddit team still pretty small. I think they do pretty well for the amount of traffic to engineers ratio.

That would be understandable if they actually hosted the content, but they don't. It's just a link aggregator.

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