Hacker News Reader

I recently benchmarked an uncached remote ASP site versus a local Node.js copy that returned identical HTML. Of course, Node was 100x as fast. (1ms vs 200ms)

However, in the browser, they felt like the same site. The 199ms head start resulted in only 50-75ms difference in the browser. Anyway, it turned our focus from backend work to CSS and image improvements.

View on HN

I wish more web developers would come to this conclusion. It's so frustrating to see people trying to save 50ms by optimising slow SQL queries or fixing slow code paths. Meanwhile the user is waiting over 5 seconds to load a page with a bloated DOM, inefficient CSS, synchronous JavaScript, etc.

If your back-end is slow, just cache it and forget about it. Front-end is almost always the bottleneck (the exceptions to this rule being near-real-time dynamic sites like New Relic or GoSquared).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com