How we increased chat performance by 10x without writing any code. | Hacker News Reader

How we increased chat performance by 10x without writing any code.

kirillzubovsky.com

"How we increased chat performance by 10x without writing any code." "this quick 'hack' required only minor changes in our code"

sigh...

Alright, to be fair, if you change anything at all in your application, you need write code. However, instead of spending two weeks and rebuilding everything under the sun, this change only required a quick update to how messages get posted.

To be precise, we do two things different now:

(1) Check if the sender of a message is the same as the current user, in which case we skip messages coming from Pusher. (2) Before sending msg data to Pusher, we copy-paste the html onto the message thread.

That's not really "writing code", as far as thousands of lines of code are concerned.

Indeed, Facebook uses this 'optimistic' posting model for at least comments as well.

http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/tutorial.html

I was first introduced to this concept by Discourse, where the frontend immediately puts into effect whatever you want to do - whether it's deleting or editing a post, and then using a callback if an error occurs. For precisely the same reasons you state, it feels faster but still gives you the option to backtrack if things go wrong.

I dont think 300ms (you did mean .3 S right)is an average page load time - hell at my last gig the target was getting 90% of pages to load in < 3 seconds.

Ok that was large publisher with some truly crufty platforms but sill sub 1s page loads are probably the exception.

I've noticed a lot of 'modern' sites now have a long-tail loading period as all the JS, resources, and real content show up.

The nav bar and structure of the FB news feed shows up < 1s for me right now, but the actual contents of the page take another few seconds. Total 3 – 5 seconds for the browser to indicate it's fully loaded.

That's correct, and doesn't that <1s load for navbar make you feel so good? Honestly, would you log into FB as often, if the first part of the page took 3 second to load?

I've talked to some friends who work at FB and yeah, they use a lot of sequential loading (forgot the technical term for that). I wish I could implement more as well; someday.

I will update the post accordingly - I was referring to this slide - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wAxB5DPN-rcelwbGO6lC...

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