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I'm working on a new realtime discussion site https://sqwok.im and one of my goals is to keep it as lean/fast as possible, both as a competitive angle & because I find it interesting. So far I get ~445kb transferred, but I have plans to lower it even further with a combination of caching and other strategies.

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What would be competitive angle? What percentage of users do you think would care if your app transfers not 445kb but 345kb (sincere question)? I just always was skeptical about "reducing sizes" just for its own sake, and not in the frame of improving performance or noticeably reducing latency for the user (which could be related to the size or not). Can't argue with the interesting part :)

Good question, and of course the difference between 445kb & 345kb may not be noticeable, but it would be if you compared it against 1/2/10mb etc.

The competitive angle is really delivering a fast/snappy/responsive experience on mobile or desktop. That in itself isn't going to save you, but it is an advantage if part of the sell is a high quality experience.

Re:interesting, for instance I just started experimenting with inlining all css/js into index.html (so far the js part is problematic), minifying classnames, and I'm curious if it'd be possible to even minify js module names etc.

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