>I'm not convinced the web pages were really _that_ slow to start with, so it feels like an unnecessary project (well, excepting the fact that web-page bloat has massively increased as people use more and more javascript libraries &c.).
Right. It's super easy to make lightning fast web pages. In fact, that's the default state of a static HTML page. It actually takes a lot _more_ work to make pages slow by adding tons of javascript, dependencies, server-side applications, etc.
From the article linked elsewhere in this thread:
>The 90th percentile weight for the canonical version is 5,229kb. [...] The 90th percentile request count for the canonical version is 647
There's the problem. Over 5 megabytes and 647 requests for one article? 5MB is equivalent to about 20 full-length novels or 1,000 pages of text. And 647 requests?! That must be one extremely comprehensive article, right? No, it's 1 request for a brief article and 646 unnecessary requests wasting bandwidth to load unnecessary stuff. Then people wonder why it's slow. But someone put in a lot of work to fluff that page up to be that huge and slow and use that many requests.
Right. It's super easy to make lightning fast web pages. In fact, that's the default state of a static HTML page. It actually takes a lot _more_ work to make pages slow by adding tons of javascript, dependencies, server-side applications, etc.
From the article linked elsewhere in this thread: >The 90th percentile weight for the canonical version is 5,229kb. [...] The 90th percentile request count for the canonical version is 647
There's the problem. Over 5 megabytes and 647 requests for one article? 5MB is equivalent to about 20 full-length novels or 1,000 pages of text. And 647 requests?! That must be one extremely comprehensive article, right? No, it's 1 request for a brief article and 646 unnecessary requests wasting bandwidth to load unnecessary stuff. Then people wonder why it's slow. But someone put in a lot of work to fluff that page up to be that huge and slow and use that many requests.