[velcrovan]

Seems like whenever I log into FB lately it's pretty much always in a state of “graceful feature degradation”.

For example, as soon as I log in I see a bell icon in the upper right with a bright red circle containing an exact positive integer number of notifications. It practically screams “click here, you have urgent business”.

I can then leave the web page sitting there for any number of minutes, and no matter how long I wait, if I click on that notification icon it will take a good 20 seconds to load the list of new notifications. (This is on gigabit fiber in a major metro area, so not a plumbing issue.)

[jerf]

This is one of the great challenges of system engineering. Any slack you build into the system has a tendency to get used over time, but that means that if you don't exert some human discipline to have monitoring on your slack and treat it as at least a medium priority that your slack is being used up that your system will rapidly evolve (or devolve, if you prefer) into one that has single points of failure after all.

To give a super simple example, suppose you have a database that can transparently fail over to a backup, but it's so "transparent" that nobody even gets notified. Suppose the team even tests it and it proves to work well. The team will then believe that they are very well protected and tell all their customers and management all about how bulletproof their setup is, but if they don't notice that the primary database corrupted and permanently went down in month six because their systems just handle it so well, they'll actually be operating on a single database after all and just be one hiccup from failure.

One of the jobs of an ethical engineer is to make sure management doesn't just say "it's OK, the site is working, forget about it and work on something else" without some appropriate amount of pushback, which you can ground on the fact that sure, they're saying to ignore it now, but when the second DB goes down and the site goes down they sure won't be defending you with "oh, but I told the engineering team to ignore the alerts and keep delivering features so it's really my fault and not theirs the site went down".

At Facebook's scale, something will always be in a state of degradation. It's just a fact of life.

[guessmyname]

Have you tried navigating the website using a web proxy (Charles, Burp Suite, or similar tool) to intercept the HTTP request(s) in order to replay them yourself multiple times to see if the latency is consistent? It’d be interesting to discover that the delay is fabricated using the front-end code or if the back-end server is really the problem. I don’t use Facebook but I asked a friend just now and the response time for the notifications panel to appear is between 500ms-2000ms, which is relatively fast for web interactions.

[philippta]

Without being able to verify, I would assume it’s designed to behave in this way. The longer you wait the more anticipation builds up, the more gratifying it becomes.

[meowface]

I think there's no chance they intentionally want users to wait 20 seconds to see their latest notifications.

[paganel]

> it will take a good 20 seconds to load the list of new notifications.

Same thing here. Thought it was my (relatively much) slower Internet connection, or maybe that I had something "wrong" (what exactly that might have been, I don't know).

[Arainach]

The initial render of Facebook's UI slows dramatically (I suspect but cannot prove intentionally) if you have adblockers/uBlock Origin/etc.

[iraqmtpizza]

at least once youtube slowed to a crawl until I cleared the cookie