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Comment by arkanciscan | Hacker News Reader

Should we also force our users to download a 30mb update every week? Just to really emulate the native app experience!

The neat thing about modern SPAs backed with your average feature-flagged CI/CD setup is that you're getting a new 30 mb download each time.

I belive you but could you elaborate for those who don't know what you mean? :)

I think they are talking about bundling before code-splitting (like we did back in the Browserify days) and that's true, but we have Webpack, or ESModules now.

Continuous Deployment implies at least a few releases per day. Especially for bundled JavaScript (which is most setups) this means you’re invalidating the cache of the entire app at every payload.

Imagine having to download an app update every time someone merged to master. That’s most SPAs.

In Webpack the chunks whose content don't change don't get new file names and so the cache needn't be invalidated for them. Vendor code which is often the largest part, can stay cached over many deployments so long as the versions are locked. Of course, your host could still send no-cache headers and invalidate everything, but that's a problem with the host/cdn.

Sure, I really do hope that engineers do their best to fix things, but in the sad world of contemporary web frontends, I'm a bit pessimistic (then again, if one has to err on the side of build system over-engineering, you're rarey disappointed).

Still, if the deployment system involves frequent node module updates, the vendor files get "dirty" quickly, too.

Sad!? You must not be old enough to remember when we used the global namespace for modules, and there was no console.log(). You wanna talk about sad, try debugging with alert().

This can be the case, but if any of the engineers on staff spend a day reading docs it should generally be fixable. A 30mb it should be chunked by the build process in such a way that small updates usually cause cache invalidation for only a few kb worth of files.

If the library you use to build your SPA (React, Vue, etc.) is relatively up to date you should also probably not be sending the whole app over the wire at once to anyone. Routes and components can be set to only load when the user actually attempts to access them inside the SPA, reducing egress significantly.

This linked page alone has 10 MB.

Insane and grotesque!

Think of all the CPU cycles on all hardware (clients + network devices) and energy used just to fetch web "content" these days.

Might as well return to just burning coal at home to keep warm, thinking of the net effect on the environment.

It's absolutely stupid.

And all the people who don't have $500+ phones, unlimited data plans and fast internet connections.

I used a ~$50 android and pre-paid plans for over a year while traveling Latin America. Wast swaths of the internet are basically inaccessible unless you have tremendous patience and nerves as well as leftover money to throw at the ISPs.

It fits with Linus's MO of making videos of how to build computers and systems 10-100X more powerful than you need.

Well it's a modern web page so it's 30mb every time you load it

Browsers have caches

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