The hard part when it comes to site optimization is persuading various stakeholders who want GTM, Clarity, Dynatrace, DataDog, New Relic, 7 different ad retargeters, Meta, X, and probably AI as well now that a fast loading website is more important than the data they get from whichever of those things they happen to be interested in.
For any individual homepage where that stuff isn't an issue because the owner is making all the decisions, it's fair to say that if your site loads slowly it's because you chose to make it slow. For any large business, it's because 'the business' chose to make it slow.
Just fire them all. Start your own company.
Eventually you'll want to know what users are doing, and specifically why they're not doing what you expected them to do after you spent ages crafting the perfect user journeys around your app. Then you'll start wondering if installing something to record sessions is actually a great idea that could really help you optimize things for people and get them more engaged (and spending more money.)
Fast forward three years, and you'll be looking at the source of a page wondering how things got so bad.
That's putting the cart before the horse. The way it's properly done is just to invite a few users and measure and track their interaction with your software. And this way you'd have good feedback instead of frustrating your real users with slow software.
Users being weird are the fundamental root cause of all software problems. :)
Things can easily change when you start adding functionalities. One site I like to visit to remind myself of how fast usable websites can be, is Dlangs forum. I just navigate around to get the experience.
Interestingly, for me each page load takes a noticeably long delay. Once it starts loading all of the content snaps in almost at once. It’s slower to get there than the other forums I visit though.
Speed:
74ms
241ms
These 30 ms and 4 ms numbers were typical Apache to Netscape from MAE East and MAE West in 1998. Twenty five years and orders of magnitude more computing later? Same numbers.
That seems to track. The vast majority of requests won’t go half way around the Earth, so maybe halving that time at 0.06 seems like a reasonable target.
Durable objects, r2 as well as tunnel have been particularly poor performing in my experience. Workers has not been a great experience either.
R2 in particular has been the slowest / highest latency s3 alternative I ever had experience with, falling behind backblaze b2, wasabi and even hetzner’s object storage.
The site should be faster, though. I’ve had a small CF workers project that works correctly with quick load times.
Getting it closer can save you 50-150ms, but if whole load takes 1s+ that's minuscule
Possibly as an extension of Quantum Computing where some probabilistic asymmetry can be taken advantage of. The QC itself might not be faster than classical computing, but the FTL comms could improve memory and cache access.
Also MetaGoog will use it to serve up hyper personalized ads in their Gemini based Metaverse.
Is the site getting slower?
And with Workers they're accessible from hundreds of locations around the world so you can get this sort of speed from almost anywhere.
End result, written in go, did around 80-200us to generate post page and 150-200us (on cheap linode VPS... probably far faster on my dev machine) for index page with a bunch of posts.
Core was basically
* pre-compile the templates
* load blogpost into RAM, pre-compile and cache the markdown part
cache could be easily kicked off to redis or similar but it's just text, there is no need
Fun stuff I hit around:
* runtime template loading takes a lot just for the type-casting; the template framework I used was basically thin veneer over Go code that got compiled to Go code when ran
* it was fast enough that multiple Write() vs one was noticeable on flame graph
* smart caching will get you everywhere if you get cache invalidation right, making the "slow" parts not matter; unless you're running years of content and gigabytes of text you probably don't want to cache it anywhere else than in RAM or at the very least have over-memory cache be second tier.
The project itself was rewrite of same thing that I tried in Perl(using Mojolicious) and even there it achieved single digit ms.
And it feels so... weird, using webpage that just reacts with speed that the well-written native app has. Whole design process was going against the ye olde "don't optimize prematurely" and it was complete success, looking at performance in each iteration of component paid off really quickly. We got robbed of so much time from badly running websites.
It appears to have static content. Why does it need any JS at all?
Looks like the only JavaScript running on the client is for installing the service worker and some Cloudflare tracking junk.
For a dynamic service, well.. maybe implement something of interest and then we can discuss.
This is a bit stochastic because of regions and dynamic allocation of resources. So, e.g. if you're the first user from a large georgraphic region to visit the website in the last several hours, your first load will be longer.
My other project (a blog platform) contains a lot of optimizations, so posts [3] load pretty much as fast as that example from the thread, i.e. 60-70ms.
3. https://rakhim.exotext.com/but-what-if-i-really-want-a-faste...
Brotli is so 2024. Use zstd. (73.62%, I know. Slightly worse compression ratio, I know that too.)
Brotli was designed for html compression so despite/while being a relatively inferior algorithm, its stock dictionary is all html/css/js-trained/optimized. Chrome/Blink recently added support for seeing content compressed with a bespoke dictionary, but that only works for massive sites that have a heavily skewed new/returning visit ratio (because of the cost of shipping both the compressed content and the dictionary).
Long story short, I could see br being better than zstd for basic web purposes.
Pretty much any small payload/non-javascript site is going to render very quickly (and instantly from cache) making SSL time be the long pole.
I decided to go check my website’s PageSpeed and I do have a 100/100/100/100 with pretty lots of content on the homepage including 6 separate thumbnails.
My site is on a straight path, no tricks — Github Pages Served to the Internet by Cloudflare.
I have 5G network :)
Also, heard multiple times that edge network can be worse, because if you're low prio and other part of globe is not busy, you get it routed in worst possible way.
- 3942ms
- 4281ms
Guess it depends on your region. This is from East-Asia.
prerender: [
{
where: { href_matches: '/*' },
eagerness: 'moderate'
}
]
https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton/blob/main/www/src/_as...
uBlock Origin does it by default for instance.
On Brave, the workaround on that linked snippet bypasses their blocking.
I think most sites could either be static HTML and use a CDN, or they need a database and pretty much have to be located in one place anyway.
It's quite hard to think of use cases where that isn't true.
Maybe add some dynamic feature for the demo so that we don't need to trust you and be surprised at a nothingburger.
Add imagery and see if you get the same results. I expect you could achieve such with Base64 but the caveat would be larger file sizes.