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Comment by x1024 | Hacker News Reader

(The article said to "try any page from The Guardian with '/amp' to test its performance")

Oh my: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bniZiH/https://www.theguardi...

"Such mobile performance, wow". 4 megabytes of video(Preloading two different videos. Why?), maybe 10 different domains, downloading JS before downloading images...

And this is the showcase for AMP.

It's almost as if "there is no silver bullet" for web performance, and "actual programming skill" is still a requirement.

There is a difference between AMP and non-AMP, yes: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bAnV7C/https://www.theguardi...

But at this point in time, it seems that installing an ad blocker has about the same impact as "conceding to view a crippled AMP-redesign of the page that doesn't even have navigation".

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It seems you have chosen a bit of an edge case. Agreed the videos shouldn't pre-load, but to take a more standard example of a simple article:

AMP: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/brWXpA/http://www.theguardia... Requests: 67 Load time: 485ms Page size: 627.3kB

Non-AMP: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/eNuTPX/http://www.theguardia... Requests: 136 Load time: 2.88s Page size: 1.8MB

And to be fair, note that the non-AMP page has a lot more content, onward links, components, etc.

Looking at the source - the videos aren't set to pre-load?

And don't a lot of these sources only start loading once the page has finished rendering? AMP is supposed to be fast-to-render firstmost, right?

It should "be optimized for mobile". 4MB per page is anything but. If you visit 100 pages per day, you'd need a 12GB data plan.

That assumes that you clear your browser cache after you view every page, or that you visit 100 separate sites every day that each weigh 4MB.

Every page weighs 4+MB, because the page-specific content on the page weighs more than 4MB. There's almost 1MB of "CSS + JS + HTML", but about 4MB of video.

Using the same tool, I can see that my website loads in 440ms in the Netherlands. The homepage is 140kb, makes 6 requests, leverages caching and http/2 thanks to nginx etc.

Which is great and everything, but for a reader in Texas, that becomes 1.2s thanks to the fact that my site is hosted in London.

As you point out, AMP pages which weigh in at 4MB can be loaded in a seemingly underwhelming time: ~800ms. However, I think the important takeaway from this is that the pages load in ~800ms in two different continents.

The articles I publish on my blog use AMP-HTML. I don't include media or ads at all, just text and fonts. These pages fully load in 200ms.

I conclude that the free CDN offered by Google is, frankly, a very attractive feature.

You can always put Cloudflare in front of a site to get the same CDN benefit.

How do you know Cloudflare or other CDNs are participating with advertisers somehow, or responding to government tracking requests?

If the government can subpoena data from Google, are we sure they're not doing the same or more with CDNs, which don't seem as transparent as the consumer-facing companies.

Cloudfare publishes a transparency report https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency/, whether you trust it is another thing. Personally I have given up on privacy and now just hope that it can be made so that we are all equally naked.

Rule number 1: "Free" isn't.

And "Place a CDN in front of it" has been an available solution for... what, more than a decade?

If your site has meaningful traffic from multiple continents, you can spend the $10/mo it takes to add a CDN to it.

For a 2016 newspaper site, I think the Guardian loads pretty fast as it is. If anyone needs some help it's the NYT.

They're pre-loading videos for the same reason Facebook does: if you post an article with a video, the video instantly plays, with little to no buffering.

"This kills the 3G data plan". At least with "the optimized for mobile" version, preloading should not happen. And it definitely shouldn't happen twice for the same video.

Agreed. Presumably they don't preload on mobile? Not sure, frankly.

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