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by jetheredge 3064 days ago
Author here... yeah, we are loading a lot of crap, aren't we? We will do an audit and make sure we aren't loading a bunch of unnecessary stuff, but the whole site should be served up through a CDN, sorry it is loading slow for you.
2 comments
masklinn 3064 days ago
The page triggers 50 HTTP queries and is 3.85MB, so a CDN is only going to do so much.

* the base page is light but has very high latency (250ms)

* there's an almost-empty CSS (style.css) next to one which seems a bit overwrought (screen.css, 140KB is a lot for a CSS file), oh plus normalize from cloudflare despite it apparently already being included in screen.css

* you're loading 9 different JS files from your CDN, plus some emoji crap from not your CDN

* typekit accounts for 1 JS query followed by fetching 12 different font files, at 15~30K each

* 14 different queries to "driftt.com" whatever the fuck that is though I expect some sort of analytics/tracking crap given

* tracking & analytics & ancillary service queries up the ass: hubspot (4), facebook (4), google analytics (2), drift.com (2), others (5)

* the Lato CSS from google fonts but apparently not the font itself, on the other hand you're loading "larsseit.otf" from your CDN, maybe pick just one?

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SAI_Peregrinus 3064 days ago
It also works perfectly fine with all 3rd-party requests blocked (via uMatrix) for me. So other than the CSS none of what you mentioned is necessary to get a readable article.
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Traubenfuchs 3064 days ago
How does something like that even happen? Did someone copy and paste lots and lots of stuff together to end up with this abomination?
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walshemj 3064 days ago
50 is quite low I was auditing a big uk ecommerce site at the weekend and the homepage had over 170 elements
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masklinn 3064 days ago
> 50 is quite low

50 could be "quite low" if most of the requests were for "content" images. TFA has under half a dozen images, as I've outlined in my comment most of the requests are for ancillary garbage.

> I was auditing a big uk ecommerce site at the weekend and the homepage had over 170 elements

See above, 170 is pretty high but assuming at least one image request per product[0] plus a few more for buttons & the like, having a large number of requests would be understandable for an ecommerce site.

ecommerce sites would also be a place where:

1. analytics is very, very understandable

2. the site would use a pretty generic system which could hinder specific optimisations

3. assuming the user will browse around, the site could preload various stuff, sacrificing some upfront performance for a nicer "inside" experience

All in all, I'd be much more understanding of that than 50 request on a blog post, even more so a blog post on software complexity. Incidentally, the amazon.com home page generates ~250 requests.

[0] because spriting for web pages remains a pain in the ass, doubly so for JPEG

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rvader 3064 days ago
Take some inspiration from here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120112045920/http://codethinke...

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