Post #4446902

2026-08-08 06:43 UTC

https://danluu.com/web-bloat/When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which caused so many users with slow connections to start using the product that load times actually increased.

Replies (4)

@viraptor@cyberplace.social 2026-08-09 11:59

@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud This is why I need every monitoring solution to provide heatmaps in addition to line charts. Ideally even default to them. #LineIsALie

Open ##4486902
@yassie_j@heckin.how 2026-08-09 10:09

@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud is this good? Is this bad? What's the moral of the story?

Open ##4486905
@uxMark@cosocial.ca 2026-08-09 03:05

@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud @Susan_calvin@mastodon.social This makes me think of quiet rural highways suddenly get overloaded when a maps/routing app is alerted to an accident up ahead on a major controlled access highway and diverts people off that highway onto the rural highway. But average drive time on the rural highway went up because it went up for some drivers. I’ve experienced this!

Open ##4486916
@dalias@hachyderm.io 2026-08-08 19:11

@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud Does that mean load times actually increased? Or that average load time increased because of a large number of new users who were now loading it usably slow rather than just abandoning it because it was unusably slow, who are now dragging up the average load time? The way it's stated it sounds like it implies the former but I'm pretty sure it's actually the latter.

Open ##4486917