

Ask HN: Why are not all websites as fast as HN? - revskill


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MichaelCrawford
web analytics is a significant factor.

The easiest way to see this is to open the Activity window in an old version
of Safari. A real old version. You could also look at proxy logs, or maybe
dump the history from firefox into a text file.

If you visit a slow site, actually your typical commercial website, you will
commonly find that it is serves at least one single-pixel gif that is either
transparent or that matches its background. Sometimes I see one-pixel
javascript, uh, "sources".

That wouldn't be so bad but their URIs are huge, long and full of query
parameters.

For reasons that don't make a whole lot of sense, quite commonly I find dozens
of these web bugs.

Back when they were called web bugs, the public was outraged. But now that we
call them "analytics", everyone thinks they are the cats meow.

Put these in your /etc/hosts file; if you use windows it has a hosts file to
but I don't recall the path:

    
    
       127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
       127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
    

most disturbing to me is that many sites offer free documents, such as adobe
web fonts, emoji, graphic buttons and the like. It costs adobe a lot of money
to give its entire font catalog away absolutely free of charge.

But a few years back, adobe acquired an analytics service.

Those analytics servers occupy entire data centers. They are expensive to
outfit, to operate, consume prodigious amounts of electricity, but to use
their SDK, and to get an analytics report on your site is typically free of
charge.

Someone is paying a lot of money to serve those one-byte whitespace
javascripts.

I don't want those mother fuckers following me around.

Thanks for letting me clear all that up.

------
cvs268
Can anyone comment on the details of the back-end hw/sw used to run HN? Also
will be quite interesting to read a post on any issues/outages and how it was
fixed... (though i cannot recall HN being down or slow for as long as i can
remember)

~~~
andrewchambers
HN goes down quite often if you browse enough ;)

------
blt
some web developers are more interested in slick effects than performance.

some direct their effort toward experimenting with new technology instead of
fine-tuning existing technology.

some do not understand performance issues well enough to prevent them.

some have a boss or client who asked for a feature that degrades performance.

the union of those groups: almost all web developers.

------
ljk
Probably because HN only has text

------
cpt1138
and no trackers

