The 512KB Club

https://512kb.club/

by serhack_ • 4 years ago

111 55 4 years ago

512kb.club

johnklos• 4 years ago

Nice idea, but how do we get more people to care about building efficient sites?

crecker• 4 years ago

Penalizing the websites that are heavy.

sovok_x• 4 years ago

I'd love to see duckduckgo to add toggleable site sorting by their common page sizes without media as a second priority, at the least.

hwers3• 4 years ago

In some sense this already exists (via users clicking away if it loads too slowly). So maybe the market has a nice balancing function for this already.

Saris• 4 years ago

If page size and weight was used much more heavily in SEO rankings that would make a big difference.

mdp20212• 4 years ago

Some engines ("some") have an interest in promoting sites with advertisements returns.

marginalia_nu7• 4 years ago

Should be pretty self-reinforcing. If sites are cropping up that load instantly, then sites that take 30 seconds to load and are sluggish to scroll start to look very bad by comparison.

scaredginger• 4 years ago

Just scrolling through the list, it looked like many of them were blogs and personal websites. I'd be much more interested in seeing lean corporate websites, as those are made by teams with deadlines and requirements to actually look good

Edit: Just noticed https://lichess.org/ is on the list

hankchinaski4• 4 years ago

Infact a better score would be a combination of daily visitors and size, popularity-adjusted size so that many personal blank sites would not come at the top

lelandfe5• 4 years ago

So few of these are actually good sites. The majority are text-only portfolios. Go figure they’re a paltry few kB.

It feels like the list is pointless, it’s saying “small sites are small” - instead of showcasing well-optimized sites that you would expect to be quite large.

Here’s my submission to usurp first place:

    <p>lelandfe’s site

raspyberr• 4 years ago

I do agree with you but I think one of the points being made is that The New York Times is basically a text-only portfolio and sits at 15MB.

lelandfe5• 4 years ago

That the majority of that NYT homepage weight is in low-priority video does not lend much credence to it being a text-only site. On an iPhone 12, it's also a 14,000px tall site, chock full of content. The HTML document size alone nearly disqualifies it from being on this list.

It feels rather... pointless? to pick on a news organization's homepage for being bloated, and then gesture at some guy's 9kB portfolio saying "see! this is speed!"

emschlr• 4 years ago

The majority are text-only portfolios.

Yeah... 512 KB is a lot of bytes for text-only website. For text-only sites the threshold should be much lower. Like ten times lower. 50 KB club anyone?

tiborsaas• 4 years ago

64k or 128k would be more interesting, I also think that 512k is very generous.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 4 years ago

So few of these are actually good sites. The majority are text-only portfolios. Go figure they’re a paltry few kB.

I agree. I still think the website with one of the highest content-to-form ratio is gnu.org:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

It makes the reader mode unnecessary - as opposed to the old version that wasn't split into columns so reading was slower:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070311064322/https://www.gnu.or...

lelandfe5• 4 years ago

I want fastsitesthatdostuff.com. No blogs, no portfolios. Give me sites that actually do things, are quite tidy in size, and are blazing fast.

- https://www.webpagetest.org/ (322kB)

- https://gutenberg.org/ (298kB)

- https://archive.org/ (441kB) [chained JS modules means it's still slow however]

Any others?

donohoe• 4 years ago

https://webperf.xyz maybe?

As a news site Rest of World is fast loading but because of lead image it can exceed 500KB in size depending on article.

https://restofworld.org/

cuu5082• 4 years ago

My SaaS landing page (https://healthchecks.io) doesn't do things by itself but it contains screenshots, integration logos, a little bit of JS. It was just over the 512KB threshold, I ran the PNG files through oxipng and got it to qualify :-)

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/healthchecks.io/qHMaqFXb/

birksherty2• 4 years ago

I want fastsitesthatdostuff.com. No blogs, no portfolios. Give me sites that actually do things, are quite tidy in size, and are blazing fast.

You want that, but most sites where people just read are big in many MBs. They are slow. That's the point, not sites doing stuff.

assemblylang2• 4 years ago

https://paint-xp.com/min.html

It's MS Paint from Windows XP, ~700 KB in size in a single HTML file. Source code available here: https://github.com/assemblylanguage/xp-paint

knoebber• 4 years ago

my site https://dotfilehub.com is on the list. It's a pretty simple web app but it does do something.

boopboopbadoop• 4 years ago

Just wanted to post and say I enjoyed reading through your website. Very succinct.

marginalia_nu7• 4 years ago

It's a real shame you can't add sites without a github account. I'd like to add search.marginalia.nu which clocks in at about 80 Kb for a full search result page.

hwers3• 4 years ago

Do you really care that little about advertising your site that you won’t even make a github account to help it grow?

marginalia_nu7• 4 years ago

I care more about my principles than I care for additional visitors to my site.

Jaruzel2• 4 years ago

Oooh my site (jaruzel.com) qualifies for 'Orange team'. I doubt I'll go to the effort of doing a Pull Request on GitHub to get it included. Nice Idea though.

TacticalCoder• 4 years ago

Nice little site: Amiga / retro computing, woodworking, home cinema... I'm into these too. Was "Hutchhikes" yours (in the "geekpics")? I've got one from 1988 (since 1999) but thankfully never crashed it.

Jaruzel2• 4 years ago

Thanks for stopping by!

No, that car was bought by a friend of mine who relocated to Mexico, and found out he could buy one even though he didn't know how to drive. Hence the end result.

Bizarrely a while later he bought another one and crashed that too. Poor guy has plate in his head now holding his skull together.

mdp20212• 4 years ago

Aside relevance:

so this member checks his internet consumption and has a little shock seeing that he seems to have burnt over 5GB in a few hours, which were especially odd since he could not remember having done anything special, as some practical reasons rendered it impossible in that timeframe. He started suspecting malware.

Than it dawned on him: in those hours he spent time scrolling one page in Reddit. Ludicrous as it is, that remains the only relevant voluntary activity.

And then he planned to start monitoring consumption systematically through `iftop` (which also needs permanent in-session memory of total consumption per address/domain, by the way).

Invictus0• 4 years ago

lichess.org is the only domain I recognized on this list

atum47• 4 years ago

I need to better compress the images on my site, but the code is very small...

hdjjhhvvhga2• 4 years ago

Thanks to this I've discovered Textpattern:

https://textpattern.com/showcase/

hwers3• 4 years ago

I wish there was a way to filter this for non text only sites. Yeah it loads fast and has a small footprint but that's hardly impressive when it's just a no css site containing a few paragraphs. I'd love to see some tiny impressive webassembly feats within this bound.

hankchinaski4• 4 years ago

Just checked my site[0] and got 247kb[1] Uncompressed and 136kb compressed, the only improvements I can see is reduce image sizes and remove third party JS code, mostly injected by Cloudflare.

[0] https://golang.cafe

[1] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/golang.cafe/7PvRciZS/

edit: 215kb after removing unnecessary js third-parties (instant.page and CF rocket loader) https://gtmetrix.com/reports/golang.cafe/Xey7C7LM/

ps: also the site is not a static site, it connects to postgresql and serves 2,000 requests daily on avg

marginalia_nu7• 4 years ago

CloudFlare's supposed acceleration has been a bit underwhelming.

I was diagnosing some problems with latencies and it turns out that CF adds a good 200 ms to my page loads (making them load at about 400ms instead of 200ms*), meanwhile, their own tests claim they're able to reduce my page loads down to a roaring 700 ms from the 1 second default.

* depending on location

hankchinaski4• 4 years ago

Couldn't see much difference in UX from using CF rocket loader and also instant.page js plugin so I will probably get rid of those too

lelandfe5• 4 years ago

Your TTFB is pretty darn high for some reason, maybe a server side caching issue? Loading should be effectively instant otherwise, good job getting all critical assets inlined.

You could also mark the company images as `loading="lazy"` – though you may intentionally be eagerly loading all of those now.

hankchinaski4• 4 years ago

yes the TTFB is probably because my application logic and database queries are not optimised at all. I guess that is my next step, I have to do some profiling to figure out why. Probably just slow db query/slow database

asdfasgasdgasdg• 4 years ago

How many of these sites serve more than 1000 queries per day to human users?

Most people find the benefits of small websites to be all that compelling. And most businesses seem to be responding to the incentives imposed by this state of affairs. I would love to see a listing of popular websites that are very compact.

marginalia_nu7• 4 years ago

My server deals with quite a bit more than that.

It's also withstood two HN "hugs of death", peaking out at multiple visits-per-second (a few dozen RPS). For what it's worth, it's hosted on a consumer-grade PC off domestic broadband.

AviationAtom• 4 years ago

Since this centers around minimalism, I figured I'd point out, to those that don't yet know of it, that a successor to Gopher exists. It's called Gemini.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

You can even get hosting for your Gemini site there.

Some sites are actually going exclusively Gemini, or partially exclusive to Gemini. Proxies to Gemini exist too.

kstenerud3• 4 years ago

I spent a lot of time shrinking down a site of mine last year. It bulked up a little bit later but is still only 22k even with images and mobile friendliness :)

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/concise-encoding.org/IbSyhS6i/

marginalia_nu7• 4 years ago

I hope you don't mind a critique; I struggled a bit understanding what your site was about. Took quite a bit to figure out it was an encoding scheme, after being confused whether it was a start-up or a library or what.

You're answering the questions a visitor has in a sensible enough order:

1. What is it?

2. Why should I use it?

3. What does it look like?

I think the proportions are off. In terms of detail, the first question is answered in a brief slogan that is very easily glossed over because it's put in a place where very little informative text usually gets put, then the second question gets a huge amount of space and details and the same points are repeated multiple times with different phrasing. Everyone claims to be "fast", "simple", "effective", "secure", "private", "cheap", "future-proof", "optimized", etc. It very easily gets dismissed as noise when you are at the same time scanning the page for clues as to what it even is about. It's hard to make a sell when what you're selling isn't clear.

Maybe you could overlap 1 and 2 a bit, somehow. If it had said "the encoding scheme is easy to use" rather than "easy to use", my question would be largely answered.

My sites aren't a marvel of intuitive navigation either, I don't claim to be better, but it's sometimes hard to see sometimes how other people view our sites.

kstenerud3• 4 years ago

Thank you! I'm of average skill when it comes to UX, which is definitely hurting the visibility of this. I'm also worried about how approachable the spec itself is, considering how hard it is to put onesself in the shoes of someone coming at it fresh. There's so much information, but nobody wants to be inundated...

I'll play around with the positioning and ordering to see if I can make it easier to find answers to the primary questions.

kstenerud3• 4 years ago

@throwawayin16 your account is shadowbanned, so I can't reply directly.

I get the feeling that the page is at a "roughly good enough" phase that the largest segment of people can find it and get a little interested (or at least I hope that's the case!) The fine tuning is always a pain.

The main page is supposed to be a little markety, and then for the technically minded there's the spec and the design doc.

I've played around with what gets emphasized first. It used to be the dual format aspect, but now since switching to the security aspect I've gotten more traction.

It's always a struggle striking the right balance between information and text density. I'll probably end up playing around for awhile yet...

skyfaller• 4 years ago

These lists are a fine starting point, but I think that the next step is to do some curation and showcase really nice / impressive examples of lean sites.

Perhaps one approach would be to have an old-school web directory, like https://href.cool/ where you have a little screenshot and blurb about why a site is notable or worth visiting.

amelius• 4 years ago

512K ought to be enough for anybody ...

cassepipe• 4 years ago

I stumbled upon lichess.org just under 512kb in the blue team. Now wonder it feels so fast. I love lichess.org.

The 512KB Club

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