/Performance

Memory Leaks: The Forgotten Side Of Web Performance

- Nolan Lawson tl;dr: "If you speed up your website by 2 seconds, everyone agrees that that’s a good thing with a visible user impact. If you reduce your website’s memory leak by 2 MB, can we still agree it was worth it? Maybe not." Nolan discusses the unique characteristics of memory leaks: (1) Low-impact until critical. (2) Hard to diagnose. (3) Trivial to fix once diagnosed.

featured in #280

The Speed Of Time

- Brendan Gregg tl;dr: Brendan describes a weird performance issue he debugged: "A Cassandra database cluster had switched to Ubuntu and noticed write latency increased by over 30%. A quick check of basic performance statistics showed over 30% higher CPU consumption. What on Earth is Ubuntu doing that results in 30% higher CPU time!?" 

featured in #255

5000x Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization

tl;dr: The author read a paper about implementing collaborative editing tools and one of the algorithms mentioned took over 3 seconds to process, which is slow. It was his own algorithm, and in this post he makes amends and shows hot to speed the tools up.

featured in #242

How Do Chrome Extensions Impact Browser Performance?

- Matt Zeunert tl;dr: "This report investigates how 1000 of the most popular Chrome extensions impact browser performance and end-user experience." Key findings: (1) Extensions like Honey, Evernote Web Clipper, and Avira Browser Safety can have a significant negative impact on website speed." (2) On ad-heavy websites, ad blockers and privacy tools can greatly improve performance.

featured in #242

How We Improved The Performance Of Our Rust App

- Aram Drevekenin tl;dr: There are two performance issues Aram solves in the multiplexer app - data overflow in the MPSC channel and performance of rendering and data parsing.

featured in #239

The Mobile Performance Inequality Gap, 2021

- Alex Russell tl;dr: "Thanks to progress in networks and browsers (but not devices), a more generous global budget cap has emerged for sites constructed the "modern" way. We can now afford ~100KiB of HTML/CSS/fonts and ~300-350KiB of JS (gzipped). This rule-of-thumb limit should hold for at least a year or two."

featured in #227

How I Cut GTA Online Loading Times By 70%

tl;dr: "GTA Online. Infamous for its slow loading times. Having picked up the game again to finish some of the newer heists I was shocked to discover that it still loads just as slow as the day it was released 7 years ago. It was time. Time to get to the bottom of this."

featured in #226

Making GitHub’s New Homepage Fast And Performant

- Tobias Ahlin tl;dr: Tobias runs through the code that makes the page performant, how illustrators work with designers and engineers, the way in which the page was designed, and more.

featured in #223

Using The Chrome UX Report API

- Rick Viscomi Shane Exterkamp tl;dr: "Learn how to use the Chrome UX Report API to get easy, RESTful access to real-user experience data across millions of websites."

featured in #189

Is WebP Really Better Than JPEG?

- Johannes Siipola tl;dr: "Google claims that their WebP format is 25 – 34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality." Here the two codecs are compared against each other on three different image sizes.

featured in #189