
Who has the fastest website in F1? - anacleto
https://jakearchibald.com/2019/f1-perf/
======
Rafuino
Wow, that Netflix documentary is reallllly helping grow interest in F1!
Enjoyed the long scroll down to see Haas as the winner. I assume the article
controls for the physical location of the request (i.e. is Haas fastest
because the author is in the US and Haas is the only US-based team and/or
hosted site?), but I didn't see it in my perusal.

~~~
Twirrim
> Wow, that Netflix documentary is reallllly helping grow interest in F1!

Based on language and phrasing used on the blog, the author is British, and F1
has been a staple on mainstream terrestrial channels for decades, although it
has seen a decline as F1 has increasingly became boring and predictable, and
almost entirely dictated by team tactics and car reliability.

~~~
gukov
I grew up watching Schumi vs Hakkinen, those were the times... It's all over
the place now.

~~~
eafkuor
What does that mean it's all over the place now? I also grew up with
Schumacher vs Hakkinen, but last season and seemingly this one are amazing.

~~~
JshWright
I'm not sure I'd call the last season "amazing". It had some promise at the
start, but it was pretty clear before too long that Hamilton was going to run
away with it again.

We'll see what this season holds (since at this time last season it still
looked like it would be a good fight to the end), but I'm optimistic. If
Bottas can retain his form from Australia (I think the wind really threw him
off in Bahrain), and if Vettel can get his head on straight, we could see a
legit four-way fight for the title.

~~~
eafkuor
Last year the midfield was where it was at.

~~~
JshWright
Even more excited for the midfield battle this year. The rookies (esp Norris)
look great, McLaren "can fight", and adding Kimi and Ricciardo to the midfield
is sure to shake things up.

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amanzi
I'd love to hear from those of you who do web work for these types of big
companies. Do they just not care about performance or are there other issues
at play? I've dabbled with some small sites and would get stressed if the page
load was more than a couple of seconds. How can these companies with large
budgets find it acceptable that page loads can take tens of seconds while
jumping content around the page or locking up threads with massive JS?

~~~
goldenkey
Most execs have the assets already cached so they dont realize. And if you
tell them to clear their cache and revisit the site they will scoff and tell
you to "scurry off with your technical nerdistry!" I don't bother trying to
rock the boat anymore. It is never appreciated, only scolded as if you are a
pedantic whiner.

~~~
StavrosK
That's because you're bad at marketing. Imagine how differently you'd be
received if instead of saying "here's how slow it is if I clear my cache" you
said "here's what a new visitor who has never been to our site before
experiences".

~~~
goldenkey
I wish that were the reason. In large companies, the communication channels
can be as bad as it is to outside customers. Put your energy into things that
reward you back for good faith efforts. Large companies often have power
structures entrenched by other factors than efficiency and function.

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berbec
How is it acceptable for any webpage to take 10s+ to render on first load? How
did we get here?

~~~
LeonM
Well... Ferrari inlined a 1.7MB BASE64 encoded image of their prancing horse
logo, only to render it at less than 1/10th of its size.

That shows it's not always the massive JS libs that are the problem. It's also
a lack of knowledge and interest from those who build and maintain the site.

~~~
strken
That sounds less like a lack of knowledge and interest, and more like a lack
of time and care. When your boss is yelling at you to upgrade the Ferrari logo
because you need to get to work on Dave's Dogfood, and you've got two hours to
do it plus nobody remembers the AWS credentials for the account with
permission to upload images to S3, you're going to hack some shit together and
deploy it then sneak out for a coffee. Your personal levels of interest and
knowledge don't come into play when faced with cost-cutting and ignorance at
the purse-string level.

~~~
amelius
Also, the programmer is not the one ultimately responsible. It's the QA team.

~~~
flurdy
Yup, chuck that responsibility over the wall. Not.

True, the QAs job is to test it delivers as requested, UX if it is usable by
the end user, ops that is is not heavy on resources etc. But it is a joint
responsibility between all and especially the developer and designer that they
deliver quality and not cut corners.

If there is an ultimate responsible it would perhaps be the project/product
owner who would decide what is important and how much time and effort they
should spend on which parts. But still it is not just pass-the-buck, they are
all responsible.

~~~
amelius
The programmer's job is to come up with the best solution in the minimum
amount of time. That's an ill-posed/unsolvable problem. Hence they will
sometimes come up with a solution that's not perfect, and they will leave it
to QA (or the product designer) to see if the solution is acceptable.

------
blattimwind
It makes me kinda sad how the article talks about a five second loading time
as something that's "relatively good". I guess between cheaply made, slow
sites and huge sites like reddit not giving two fucks about performance the
goalposts have shifted dramatically toward the bad.

Personally for simple content-based sites I find anything above ~half a second
is already quite bad, assuming a reasonable underlying connection to the
server (ping < 30 ms).

~~~
MuffinFlavored
reddit is slow? I've never experienced that?

~~~
snazz
The new SPA site is slower than
[https://old.reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com) by a fair margin.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
On mobile it's an artificial delay to upsell the app.

~~~
realusername
Their mobile site is even slower than the desktop site if you try to load both
on desktop.

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cyberferret
As a long time F1 fan, I love the premise of this article. Perhaps we should
also investigate the correlation between team marketing budgets vs web site
speed, as that seems to be a major talking point about their R&D budgets vs
track speed these days...

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deshi
When I started out I used to contact companies and try to sell them a site
upgrade, generally focusing on something that was better looking. I wonder if
now the better opportunity is to demonstrate how much more efficiently you can
code their site to increase performance. Reinforcing that with data on how
this affects sales and surely you could snatch quite a few contracts.

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JshWright
Hey look, Williams is fast again...

~~~
leemailll
Haha, good one

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hit8run
Bloat. Just bloat. Bring back the motherf... website that is just plain old
html.

~~~
OrgNet
yeah, and if you really need those scripts, stop loading them from 10
different domains...

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rdbell
Testing F1 race team websites for speed is a neat idea.

I'm a cofounder of PacketStream.io

We'd love to see you re-run these tests from our network of global residential
proxies to see results from different locations around the globe. Our product
lets you select a geolocation to exit from as part of the request.

If you're interested in free credits to run some more speed tests send me an
email: ronald at packetstream io

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AJMaxwell
This is one of the metrics I use when voting

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davidjnelson
Cool article, read the mercedes example. That stuff is super basic, why would
they ship such a terrible product?

~~~
clouddrover
They've been too busy winning the F1 championship every year for the last five
years.

~~~
StavrosK
But apparently not too busy to make a website about it.

~~~
magicalhippo
Mercedes got 500 folks employed just to make the F1 engine[1], I'm sure they
can afford to hire someone to get a couple of websites made. That it's not
better is probably because, does it need to be?

[1]: [https://www.mercedes-amg-hpp.com/about-us/](https://www.mercedes-amg-
hpp.com/about-us/)

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aboutruby
Would be cool to see what the performance would be with Cloudflare in front of
those sites.

~~~
jaffathecake
Aside from Williams who suffer from HTTP/1, the performance bottlenecks are
little to do with server architecture or TTFB.

~~~
aboutruby
They do all kinds of caching, image compression, etc. I think most of those
are in paid plans though.

Just mentioning it as it's quite a simple, fast, free change that doesn't cost
any developer hours.

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mitchtbaum
> I mean, it makes sense right?

Yes.

