28
votes
A quick look at reddit load times on my (crappy) home internet connection.
I decided to take a second look at the reddit redesign out of curiosity, and the lack of responsiveness was jarring. I found myself waiting several seconds just for a click to properly register. So I decided to take a look at the actual numbers for a bit of fun. Here are the results as reported by the Firefox network tab:
Redesign
13.88 MB / 7.23 MB transferred
Finish: 57.46 s
DOMContentLoaded: 1.92 s
load: 25.67 s
Old
1.91 MB / 631.45 KB transferred
Finish: 1.06 min
DOMContentLoaded: 3.23 s
load: 3.97 s
And just for the sake of comparison:
~
358.34 KB / 110.39 KB transferred
Finish: 1.48 s
DOMContentLoaded: 1.34 s
load: 1.51 s
I use Firefox as well and I have noticed a massive increase in load times and a reduction of UI responsiveness. Shockingly bad.
Frankly I don't think reddit cares very much, given Firefox's market share. Especially when you factor in how little they likely care about desktop browsers at all. Mobile and especially reddit app usage will be their primary focus and anything else will be at best an afterthought and at worst nothing at all.
Alas, I think often about the extreme reduction of UI quality now that everything is collapsed down into such a small interface area. Not just for reddit but for computing in general.
I can’t get over how much it reminds me of Twitter.
I wonder if people genuinely don’t care or whether they just don’t know it any other way, nowadays. That can only be a web design dead end, right? It feels to me like those hilarious, GIF-infested 90s designs we now look back at and laugh. Only less charming.
I think that it's just a case of most people having internet connection speeds that make the load times negligible. Unfortunately there are still a lot of people who have garbage internet that end up being forgotten about as a result.
I remember people saying they liked reddit because they could load it over dial-up, but it seems those days are gone.
Welcome to Australia!
I gave feedback to reddit saying the reddit redesign looked good. Later I looked at the redesign better and I regretted me saying that to them, so a sort of guilt I feel now sorry guys and gals.
I made the mistake of going to the new reddit using an ancient WebKit version, huge mistake, I had to wait several minutes until I could kill the process because the computer wouldn't respond at all.
I guess the majority of people are going via phone, sure enough it'll their priority to get that running first. But I never even used Reddit on the official way since a long time, so what do I know. Cool smiley where I shrug my shoulders.
Hoping for an app I'll can use on tildes :p
Wow, that's a massive difference... I've been really happy with the technical side of ~ so far. Everything is really fast, and there are no CDN's.
Odds are we'll see these numbers change once the load increases and more features are added. That being said, I imagine ~ will still remain fairly lightweight and not bring in excessive load times.
On the technical side, I really really hope that if/when ~ becomes bigger, it doesn't go the way of reddit. I remember when reddit actually gave a shit about its users. Those days are long gone.
On the community side, PLEASE DON'T TURN INTO VOAT. That place is a god damn cesspool of hate, racism and bigotry.
Yeah, but why does it have to be a single page site? I don't get this obsession with making the site one single page you JavaScript between.
For better or worse, the new paradigm in web development is making the web application serve nothing more than an API endpoint for a fully-developed client-side application to connect to from the browser. It has a lot of uses and it allows websites to serve more users with fewer resources. However, it opens up some doors for poor developers to make very poor client-side applications.
I'm hardly a talented web developer by any stretch of the imagination. I fix computers for a living and develop web apps out of necessity when I can't find something I want. But having peeked into reddit's code when it was still open source, as well as developed browser extensions for reddit, I can say I don't think reddit hires very good web developers. Reddit really need a Linus Torvalds to dish out some abuse for poor code.
I get what the advantages are, but it really creates a bad experience for mobile users who don't have the app in my experience. When someone links a tweet on Reddit it takes my browser at least 20 seconds to load a 280 character string, that's ridiculous. Same thing for reddit, I use my own client but whenever a link decides to launch on chrome it blows. I get that it's better if you're loading more than one page, but for those sites I usually just want to see one page and then close it.
Let's not even talk about Facebook. I'm not downloading their app and I stopped using it because it's slow on my desktop with 8gb of RAM, ridiculous.
Just having a client-server relationship doesn't inherently make a bad experience for mobile users. That is squarely on the developers.
Don't get my started on Facebook. I haven't voluntarily used it in over five years.
I love certain JS frameworks. I use Vue for my current work because I can simply communicate with API endpoints and modifying the DOM is way more efficient than with jQuery for the features I work with. It makes my job significantly easier.
The difference, of course, is that my page load isn't so abysmal and doesn't eat up several MB.
As example: I'm a huge fan of neverending scrolling, it's getting me more hooked up.
Some examples which come right to my mind:
Seeing something, ignoring it, getting back to it while having scrolled further, without needing to switch through a ton of sites, while searching for it.
If I want to skip some sites I just scroll and scroll, short waiting to see if I was already there, and if so, I just scroll a bit further.
I think that navigation on phone through multiple sites (if you just put something in the URL e.g. a specific page number) is just painful. I don't want to switch sites, don't want to type manually (except for comments) or whatever. And always clicking some buttons for new content isn't that comfortable either.
But that's just what I think about mobile browsing :)
PS: even entering the URL of tildes into the phone (yes, I can add a bookmark on my screen, but that's work, too) is a hassle. :D
Since I got a reply from you and another poster I feel like I'm not getting my point across: I don't think websites using javascript is bad at all, you can't really do much without javascript. The main problem is websites that make you load a 10mb javascript client that has to start up and THEN start loading the content.
Go on reddit on mobile if you want to see that in action, you'll notice it especially if you have a slow phone. It shows the reddit logo loading even if you got linked to a comments thread.
On the other hand, tildes loads almost instantly because they're not using that much javascript.
On that you're absolutely right. I can't quite comprehend what sort of stuff they need in their library.
Was on the impression you are arguing against one site websites, too. :)
Yeah, I'm aware of the trade-off. It can also potentially reduce data usage by only retrieving JSON.
That being said, after a page reload or opening in a new tab, the initial load time comes into play again, so with the way I browse, the benefit just isn't there.
Yeah, the redesign is really sluggish right now. That said, if I understand your results right, it takes longer for your computer to process the old look of reddit over the new one? That would be odd given that the old one is much more basic and render friendly. I think Tilde can't really be compared yet because we don't have the same number of posts and don't have images for example, which is where the bulk of the loading probably comes from. It is really snappy though, I absolutely love it :D and it is one of the few websites that works properly in KDE 3's version of Konqueror, which is really nice.
Try not to focus on the
finishtoo much. That metric is a bit funky and inconsistent.Regarding ~, I only put that there for fun and really for comparing data transfer, rather than for timing. I've also noted in a reply on the above comment that we'll likely see our own numbers change later.
None of my post should be construed as an authoritative assessment of performance. For that, I would want to perform repeat experiments under more controlled circumstances and publish my data here for others to pick apart ;)
I love that number, I could kiss it.
EDIT: I kissed it.
EDIT2: @Deimos don't cock this up.
To be fair, this is going to be open sourced, so you'll have to blame contributors as well ;)
Still going to blame the head chef.
It's awful at how slow it is now, bloated scripts everywhere.