
Facebook: Sea Cow of the Internet - bkrausz
http://nerdlife.net/2008/07/22/facebook-sea-cow-of-the-internet/
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jfarmer
Brian's conclusion seems to be that Facebook is failing at something.

I think the more proper conclusion is that Facebook's audience doesn't care
about this stuff.

Facebook is still growing at a break-neck pace. Why should they dedicate
resources towards speeding up their site unless there's strong evidence it
will help them achieve their strategic goals?

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blader
Just asked somebody at Facebook who works on this stuff - apparently they do
care and it is a balance between a giant freaking download or increasing HTTP
requests. There is also the issue of redownloading a giant file whenever a
small piece of JS changes on the site, which can happen quite happen.

They've also profiled the browser performance itself and found that loading
all their JS in-memory is actually a performance issue.

So I guess the answer is that they've really thought this through and came up
with the best solution that works for them.

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blader
I don't know whether to interpret that as 'Facebook is failing spectacularly
at easy things with an awesome team' or 'those easy things apparently do not
matter.'

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menloparkbum
The author was trying to make the case for your first point but instead makes
the case for your second.

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iron_ball
It's still faster than MySpace. Which, sadly, is used by all the people I want
to keep in touch with.

