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Comment by smarkov | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, "should" is a bit of a click-baity exaggeration. In this day and age where internet speeds are faster and more stable than ever, these kinds of tips should be at the very bottom of your optimisations checklist. I don't care if your website takes 3 seconds to load or 5, what I do care about is that once the website has loaded, my inputs respond as quickly as possible. Reddit for example is total garbage when it comes to responsiveness, clicking on a post literally freezes the page for 1+ seconds on a fairly capable PC.

View on HN

Slightly OT. Speaking of Reddit, I am genuinely curious, do developers of the Android app never test the app or something? I was nagged into installing the app (sorry, I am not as persistent as your typical HN user), but it is actually so much slower than the website, and the content usually just don't load altogether. To be clear, I am on very fast Internet.

https://imgur.com/a/hg1gp0a

Reddit is the only service I know of that seems to want to sell you ads, but also goes out of your way to make your life much worse.

If you've got a good amount of bandwidth available you should try Sync. It's an unofficial app but it's built around the ability to prefetch posts and comments. It seems to batch requests in some way, so when you've got a good connection you can get quite a lot of stuff loaded for when your connection dips later (i.e. a train).

That said, there's still more waiting involved than with visiting HN but that's probably because Reddit is much more graphics focused.

Yes, but you should also be mindful that if your site is being viewed by an international audience. A 3 second load time on an average local internet connection can be a minute long load time elsewhere in the world.

.. or on a train in a tunnel in your very own city.

Bandwidth is getting better more quickly than latency is. TCP slow start requires a round trip to speed up, and if you want that to improve, you need to reduce latency. Increasing bandwidth won’t help.

Mobile data is very inconsistent when in rural areas. The best speed I got in an urban areas was around 800Mbit/s but I have seen speeds in some rural areas closer to 1Mbit/s to 3Mbit/s. That is in the UK, not a 3rd world country.

In my rural unit in the densest area of Seattle, I routinely have to hold my phone slightly to the left or all network requests are a crapshoot. I also often have to force quit the browser just to resume any network requests. If your website requires that much hand holding, most people don’t know how to do it even if they know they need to or want to.

Well, the primary utility is different, and they have memory leaks throughout, but conceptually it's still the website loading slowly.

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