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by kmitz 1359 days ago
It'd be interesting to know why load time hasn't improved.

In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ? How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency ? Is it a problem of latency or bandwidth ? What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ? Just wondering

3 comments

> In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ?

I'm not sure what sort of analysis you're looking for, but different sites have different problems. I'm not convinced that averaging them makes sense, and it's very difficult to create a reasonable metric. As soon as you start measuring some specific metric, people will optimize for it whilst still making the site unusable. Unfortunately "usable state" is too hard to quantify without it being game-able.

> How much is due to the recent massive deployment of https and related latency

Very little, you can check here [0] and see for yourself. Obviously it depends on your distance to the server you are reaching, but the added latency of HTTPS isn't really a factor when you're looking at 10s for a page to load.

> What type of contents is causing most of the waiting time ? Images, css, js ?

Lets look at CNN (only because I happen to remember that a lite version exists thanks to someone on HN). The lite[1] version loads entirely in 350ms for me. The normal version[2] with adblock on finishes loading everything after 1.43s. The normal version with adblock off, finishes loading after 20s and reflows a bunch of times as ads get loaded.

So I agree with the rest of the comments, it's "because of js and adtech".

Disclaimer: I'm in South Africa at the moment on 4g, my internet isn't the best :)

[0] https://www.httpvshttps.com/

[1] https://lite.cnn.com/en

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/

> In the comments I mostly see "because of js and adtech", but is there a factual analysis somewhere ?

I don't know about a real analysis, but it's pretty easy to see the effect in your own browser. Disable JS and see how much faster the page loads.

I put Patreon's official button on a site once and was confused at the seconds it added to the load. It's a little button!

Turns out it was hauling in 10MB of analytics scripts.