Comments on: Web pages are getting more bloated, and here’s why

By: Anirudh Mathur

Anirudh Mathur — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 08:47:45 +0000

Extremely informative article . Thanks a lot for providing answers to
the questions i was pondering on for a long time so simply & effectively !!!

By: PBX

PBX — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 07:35:55 +0000

In reply to Lennie. I agree with you on this.

By: Andrew Johnstone

Andrew Johnstone — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:16:42 +0000

The interesting part is that increasing broadband connections speed will not dramatically increase the speed at which pages will load and render. The problem is with the expense of establishing tcp connections in the first place. Additionally all browsers limit the number of simultaneous connections that can be made. As highlighted by the table below.

HTTP/1.1 HTTP/1.0
IE 6,7 2 4
IE 8 6 6
Firefox 2 2 8
Firefox 3 6 6
Safari 3,4 4 4
Chrome 1,2 6 ?
Chrome 3 4 4
Chrome 4+ 6 ?
iPhone 2 4 ?
iPhone 3 6 ?
iPhone 4 4 ?
Opera 9.63,10.00alpha 4 4
Opera 10.51+ 8 ?

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/03/20/roundup-on-parallel-connections/

There are a number of ways that attempt to reduce tcp connections and both apply to the above. Firstly http keepalives are aimed to reduce the tcp connection overhead, additionally http pipelining aims to reduce the round trip time for http requests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_persistent_connection
http://blog.amt.in/what-is-http-pipelining-why-is-it-important-f
http://www.blaze.io/mobile/http-pipelining-big-in-mobile/

The other aspect is that the analysis collected is not very descriptive of what it is based on. For example, of those sites, how many were correctly using etags and gzip compression?

By: Pete Markiewicz

Pete Markiewicz — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:03:40 +0000

I’d be VERY interested to find historical data on web page downloads going back further than the HTTP archive (about 1 year). It seems to me that greater efficiency afforded by HTML5 and CSS3 might paradoxically lead to increased resource use, as described by “Jevons’ Law” or “Jevons’ Paradox” for oil and other energy consumption in the real world. Does an increase in efficiency lead to greater resource use?

Comparing the web of 10, even 20 years ago to today would be VERY instructive. Was the “world wide wait” of the 1990s worse than today? Or, have we developed UX that hides increased downloads (as described in this article http://www.uie.com/articles/download_time/)

By: Roger Burke

Roger Burke — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:53:44 +0000

Ineresting stats from Pingdom and would be a problem if they were static pages being sent for the server. What we now have is Ajax & while that may increase the javascript load it will actually decrease the traffic.

Also the browser is now being used more to service pages through javascript which again reduces the traffic.

So while the individual page size may be increasing, it would be interesting to see how long they stay up before being replaced.

By: Lennie

Lennie — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:54:58 +0000

Something else I noticed, which in theory is a good thing but obviously impacts performance of your not using a CDN: https is used more for external resources now.

By: Lennie

Lennie — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:37:04 +0000

What I really hate are the large numbers of redirects (like url shorteners) and how all these extra Javascript libraries are loaded from so many different domains.

Many sites now have 10+ domains on every single page, that is just stupid. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

Also I have an improvement request for Pingdom, add a (optional) accept encoding gzip deflate header to your monitoring service it is more realistic.

By: Brian Manning

Brian Manning — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:47:17 +0000

One interesting thing to see would be the relative size change of videos over that time. That’s a lot of bandwidth, and people are serving higher quality videos, yet at the same time codecs are advancing and becoming more effecient. Just would be an interesting additional study for someone.

By: Ted Goas

Ted Goas — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:37:54 +0000

has anyone mentioned Micro JS yet? Popular core JS libraries are big (jQuery, jQuery UI without customization are over 100k each. A lot of site don’t use everything included in them.

Using MicroJS can help ensure site authors only add what they need and don’t get too much extra code.
http://microjs.com/

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:32:04 +0000

About the JS libraries, I mean sure shims and polyfills are bad in a sense because they create overhead that shouldn’t be there but it is just a fact of life if you are using a new technology. I enjoy writing jQuery, yes I can write vanilla JS. The one big thing you do with JS is interact with the DOM so to me $() or document.getElement.byId() I mean its not a huge difference until you do it 50 times then it does become a huge difference. That is only one example of write less do more. So I wouldn’t really blame libraries especially if you use the CDN version it is probably cached anyway even if they are a new user so the overhead is next to nothing since you won’t be using a http request unlike yoursite.com/site.js which wouldn’t be cached for a new user. Unless you really need something really can’t get with a library why would you bother using more kb download time as well as more development time. If I really need what vanilla JS brings I could do a large amount of it with a server side language which in turn won’t hit me on initial download or processing power,granted it will hit me for a http request later on but it may be 2 or 3 in small succession instead of 20. Thanks.