A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

http://mike.teczno.com/notes/bandwidth.html

by skimbrel • 14 years ago

293 110 14 years ago

mike.teczno.com

Maybe so, but how much of that 1.65MB of Javascript is cached by the browser?

pyre2• 14 years ago

If the initial load-up time is slow, then you're probably less likely to click that Twitter link knowing that the initial page-load is always slow.

The warm-cache situation only matters to people that are on Twitter all the time, so this possibly has the effect of keeping existing users happy while raising a barrier to new users (or pushing infrequent users to completely abandon the system).

Secondly, you're only looking at download size (the importance of is really to imply a certain amount of time it takes to download those resources). Since Twitter's JS platform is about doing all of the HTML rendering on the client-side that has to be taken into account (this wasn't a concern in the past when it was mostly done on the server-side). If the page takes 3s ~ 5s to load even with a warm cache and a tiny (size) ajax-request, then it sort of defeats the purpose (unless your purpose is to relieve server-load instead of in-browser load times).

poutine• 14 years ago

His rant doesn't seem too informed: "aggressive anti-performance and apparent contempt for the web by Twitter’s designers"

According to his charts most of Twitter's page is JS/CSS and presumably set to heavily cache. Very little is data. Once you've done the first page load Twitter's pages will load quite fast and efficiently. While quite a lot of JS, this is good design, not bad.

mortenjorck• 14 years ago

A more accurate title might be "The Twitter web client is 2.0 MB."

aaronpk• 14 years ago

The problem is that Twitter broke links to tweet pages by using the #! URL structure. Now you can't load a tweet page without loading the entire app. That's bad.

newman3145• 14 years ago

But it is still bad that you need to suffer through the initial load (at least once).

EDIT: There are still many devices and locations that do not have high speed access. Just because a page loads quickly (relatively) due to the fact that you are sitting on top of a OC192 link does not mean that the load time is dog slow for say someone in Rwanda.

In fact, web devs should review their sites through a network simulator as part of the QA process.

condiment• 14 years ago

What's interesting about Twitter's model is that no data actually comes down to the user when they first request a tweet. Twitter builds the page, loads the layout, and initializes the client-side script, which makes a JSON request to pull an individual tweet after everything has loaded.

This means that to get the requested information on first load, the user has to wait for a 2MB download, followed by another roundtrip Ajax request to twitters tweet retrieval API. This results in the perception of a slow page load, even though the tweet itself comes down the pipe in only 100ms.

In my view, Twitter is an excellent case study in some of the pitfalls of thick-client application design. Mainly that ignoring the first-time-use case will result in widespread perception among users that your app is slow, even when every page view after the first is lightning fast.

abraham• 14 years ago

That is not entirely true. If you are authenticated your home_timeline is embedded in the page for instant rendering. Once Twitter moves away from #!'s individual tweets will be embedded as well.

underwater3• 14 years ago

Yahoo did a study a while back and found that ~50% of their visitors had a cold cache http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part...

newman3145• 14 years ago

Plus if you access Twitter over SSL, there might not be caching resulting in heavy loads repeatedly.

Zirro• 14 years ago

In early 2007. Isn't this likely to have changed in five years?

mhd• 14 years ago

Which is perfectly okay for the regular twitter web client, but we're talking about a single tweet status here, i.e. a page where you arrive by clicking on a link like "Bob Bobson recently stated that frobnication is all gonked up". Then you want to read the full 140 characters of what Bob Bobson said, and whoops, two megabytes.

(Never mind that at least for me, tweets are increasingly often turning up as search engine hits)

ralfd2• 14 years ago

Hm, true. But often tweets are insular. When a funny quip is linked you just want to read that.

blhack2• 14 years ago

I run chrome in incognito mode pretty much 100% of the time, and this totally explains why loading tweets is so freaking slow lately.

peeters• 14 years ago

Chrome caches in Incognito mode. It just doesn't let the cache leak out of the session. So this might explain the first tweet you load being slow, but if you load a second it should be just as fast as in normal mode.

Lagged2Death2• 14 years ago

The author has responded[1] to some comments made when this was posted to MetaFilter[2]. He knows about caching, and he has some reasons why caching doesn't help as much as you'd think.

[1] http://www.metafilter.com/113541/The-Magic-Dollar-Sign#42233...

[2] http://www.metafilter.com/113541/The-Magic-Dollar-Sign

Google and Yahoo have been preaching for years that even fractions of a second of page load time have a big impact on how likely users are to give up and go somewhere else. Caching doesn't help anyone if the user doesn't come back. It would really be better (for Twitter) to make that first, uncached page load the fastest one of all.

mhurron• 14 years ago

> Google and Yahoo have been preaching for years that even fractions of a second of page load time have a big impact on how likely users are to give up and go somewhere else

Well of course they worry about it. I can ditch Google and go to Yahoo, DDG, Bing, hell Lycos might still be around, if the Google homepage takes too long to load. Obviously same for Yahoo. Neither of them produce or host the content (search, news) that you're going there for.

That's not quite the same situation as Twitter, GMail, Facebook and whatnot. Where else are you going to go? Your mail is in GMail, or your friends tweet is on Twiter, their wall is on Facebook and they are only there. The "instant load or I'm out of here" doesn't apply so much to them. It really only affects new users who have no other attachment to the service.

I doubt it's much of a problem for Twitter.

Tobu• 14 years ago

Caching is fine when I'm actively using Twitter, but if I do something else these 2MB will be competing against other junk|useful stuff.

I've used Twitter not very long ago (since then I've visited a forum, a piece of docs, left my browser idle half an hour, and visited HN), now I've just looked in about:cache and twitter/twimg only have a handful of profile pictures.

brigade• 14 years ago

I visit a couple twitter feeds daily (because I don't particularly want an account and their RSS is broken), so presumably I normally have a warm cache.

It typically takes anywhere from 4-8 seconds before the first tweet appears, and another 2-4 seconds before the page is fully loaded. Twitter is quite definitely the slowest website I visit on a regular basis.

lordlicorice• 14 years ago

Maybe his "contempt for the web" comment is referring to the traditional hyperlink-based Web 1.0 model. Every time I try to view a tweet, I get redirected to https://twitter.com/?_twitter_noscript=1

mmaunder• 14 years ago

Did you know, gmail's entire web app is 1.66 megs once fully loaded? Users visit it many times every day and they've still optimized the hell out of it. Same goes for many other well built web apps. Twitter has been getting away with sloppy engineering since their inception and yet they continue to give others engineering advice.

shareme• 14 years ago

yes but in twitters defense gmail now is 1.6 megs it was over 2.5 megs some time ago..about the time wave was launched..they heavily refactored gwt due to the problems with wave..

aethr• 14 years ago

It's also worth noting that you load gmail's web client to interact with an entire inbox full of mail, sending, receiving etc.

The point of the OP is that a user is loading 2 megs to view a single tweet. A medium that is literally defined by its brevity, should not need to send 2 megs to your browser so that you can read 140 characters.

smeg• 14 years ago

"His rant doesn't seem too informed"

Worse than that, he seemed to lack some basic understanding of the modern web. The Twitter webpage is not simply a "page" in the traditional sense - it is one instance of the Twitter client app, that happens to be written in Javascript and runs in a Browser.

2MB for a rich client app? Doesn't sound like overkill to me.

moe• 14 years ago

How would you like it if a new copy of iTunes was spawned every time you click a MP3 in finder? That's about the analogy for the current twitter situation.

I wonder why twitter doesn't simply serve up a static "fake" page for direct links. That could easily weigh in under 100kb and display instantly. Then make all links on that page boot up the "real" twitter.

That way the long wait is at least mitigated until the user actually starts to interact with the page (which in 99% of cases he'll never do because he only wanted to read that one tweet).

tintin• 14 years ago

This HN page is about 1.2KB. Now tell me again why you need 2MB for a single Tweet page. Also take a look at the mobile Twitter site: http://mobile.twitter.com/bos31337/status/172156922491969536

Today PG posted some HN stats: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3669947 It seems that HN is still running on one server!

Don't fool yourself. Twitter is bad design, not good.

funkah• 14 years ago

Simplistic.

untog4• 14 years ago

File this under "annoying to developers and no-one else".

Twitter obviously caches 99% of this stuff. I absolutely agree that 2.2MB on one page seems absolutely insane, but that doesn't match up with the experience every time you load the page. And I imagine it's pre-caching code that runs on other pages as well, so you most likely only ever take that download hit once.

Yes, they should bring that amount down. No, it probably isn't going to be a priority.

ChrisLTD2• 14 years ago

Shouldn't it be a higher priority? More and more web users are accessing sites from low powered devices with slow connections that might even have data caps (think tablets or netbooks on 3G networks).

Twitter pages don't even seem particularly complex functionally or graphically, so why should the payload be so large?

untog4• 14 years ago

More and more users are on mobile devices, sure. But those load up the mobile version of the Twitter site, which is very lean.

huggyface2• 14 years ago

File this under "annoying to developers and no-one else".

I never follow Twitter links because of exactly this (well and the fact that they trap you with forwards). It is a terribly negative experience. Even if I had all of those files cached the parsing and execution of all of that JavaScript is far from instantaneous.

Same deal with TechCrunch -- stopped visiting because it is such a script-laden monstrosity that it seriously diminishes the experience.

untog4• 14 years ago

Say- are you a developer?

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

I'm not a developer, and this is a major reason I never click on links to tweets any more. Particularly when using a smartphone, I find the long load times of many web pages so annoying that I simply avoid visiting such sites altogether.

webwanderings• 14 years ago

No wonder it takes long for Twitter pages to load. Such things show up only when you're on slower speeds.

erikabele• 14 years ago

Exactly - just set your phone to EDGE and pull up a tweet page in your mobile browser and you'll see how long it takes. And not only for the 1st page load but for all others too. I can pull up a Facebook page (while being logged in) and have that served to me in a fraction of the time it takes for Twitter. Compare that to the feature-set and your opinion will change quickly. Just try it, no stats & graphs needed, you'll see...

DanI-S• 14 years ago

Honestly, Facebook's load time is quite phenomenal. It is one of the most feature-laden and complex consumer web applications out there and they still manage to set the bar with regards to speed and multi-platform usability.

zacman85• 14 years ago

Does anyone know how to get those graphs to show up in the current version of WebKit? They seem to have disappeared or are hidden.

ralfd2• 14 years ago

This is a good question. The resource panel from the old Safari 4 webinspector looked that way:

http://www.webkit.org/blog/197/web-inspector-redesign/

jason_slack• 14 years ago

Yup, Safari 5 I dont see this.

neilmiddleton• 14 years ago

Ah, but how big is the (downloaded) size of the next page on each of those sites?

tpurves• 14 years ago

How does this work, is he reporting compressed or uncompressed sizes of data? text/css/js compresses really well for transmission, images do not.

User-defined image backgrounds can also be up to 800k-ish for twitter too right?

noonespecial• 14 years ago

The first tweet is 2 MB. How much is the second?

shimon_e3• 14 years ago

The web will be a better place once everyone has 100mbps and servers have 10gbps. Sites like the verge can load in one second without caching.

robin_reala• 14 years ago

Wirth’s Law: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

shimon_e3• 14 years ago

Web data usage != slow software

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

Unfortunately bandwidth has not kept up with the rate of Moore's law(unrelated one, I know), so it is becoming a bottleneck for faster computing(along with spin disk speeds) for a large section of people.

And even if you have large bandwidth, the latency that comes into play is another factor, not to mention folks opening 50 tabs which causes delays in opening and rendering a new one.

cbs• 14 years ago

And once everyone has that for a little while it will become slow and painful again.

Remember dailup back in the day? When a T1 would have been overkill for a single household? Look at those numbers from today's perspective: a T1 is only 1.5 Mbps, thats just 192 KBps.

simonw3• 14 years ago

The popularity of mobile devices for browsing (or tethering) means that for the first time in the Web's history the amount of available CPU and bandwidth has been going down, not up, for a huge chunk of users.

rowanseymour• 14 years ago

I live in Rwanda and like a sizeable portion of Twitter's userbase, have very slow internet. When Twitter switched to their new design it got a lot harder to open their site... I kept using the old version until they removed it. I don't understand why - it's not pulling down a lot of data, it's not even making that many requests (~50), but this site and other AJAX rich sites just don't seem to work as well as the old less-AJAXy versions on a really slow internet connection with a bit of packet loss

pavelkaroukin• 14 years ago

And it is funny - AJAX-related technologies were promoted exactly to make sites more lightweight and more responsive..

bergie• 14 years ago

You could argue that Twitter is more responsive than it would be using server-generated HTML pages. But the initial app download is much bigger than it would be with that method.

klous• 14 years ago

if you want a more lightweight version of twitter on any browser, try: http://mobile.twitter.com

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

I used to use that all the time. It's essentially old twitter with a layout that is a little less wide.

technomancy• 14 years ago

You can also play user-agent games to get the Android version in your browser. I prefer the regular mobile edition, but it's interesting to poke around; I've found three separate versions of the site just by faking out my user agent.

johncoltrane• 14 years ago

All of the comments here could be shortened to "It's cached so it doesn't matter" as if the main problem was "2 MB is too large hence loading is too slow".

But the problem here (according to the author and I tend to agree with him) is that one needs to load too much junk for too little actual content; whether the junk in question is cached or not.

Now, ideally, a tweet's 140 characters shouldn't weight 2 MB but Twitter users need tools to act upon those tweets: re-tweet, follow a link, etc. and those tools come with a cost.

A relatively high cost but one we can afford, with the help of caching.

Isofarro• 14 years ago

A retweet is just a post request. A follow this person is a post request. Those can both be done with a simple HTML form.

woodall• 14 years ago

If you give the browser a form, it's going to want a callback(JS); to make sure everything went through. When you give it the callback, it'll probably ask you for a image; pretty UIs are important. When you give a browser an image, it'll need to be styled(CSS). . . and so begins the theory of "If you give a browser a cookie".

Granted 2MB is pretty big, but the only people I see complaining are techies; valid complaints but do not effect Twitter's bottom line.

hpaavola2• 14 years ago

One tweet is 2 MB? More like 670 KB for first load and 18 KB cached. http://imgur.com/QFIjU

jarek• 14 years ago

hpaavola2• 14 years ago

Nothing happened. Page size stayed roughly the same.

mfringel• 14 years ago

Several people in this thread state "It's cached, so why does it matter?"

So, even ignoring the issue with cold caches, how about the two megabytes of code that the browser may need to go through to render the page?

What on earth is twitter doing on a given page that needs two megabytes of code?*

* As of March 2012, for I'm sure this will look silly when there are 2 gigabyte pages, 20 years from now.

Timmy_C• 14 years ago

I looks like most of the inline JavaScript is there to handle DOM abstraction and events. Every click essentially needs to be able to build a part of the page client-side.

badusername• 14 years ago

I don't think we'll have 2 gigabyte codebases..

kondro• 14 years ago

Higher resolution displays, bump/texture maps for live 3D rendering, 8K video, etc could all contribute to huge page sizes.

OneBytePerGreen• 14 years ago

Funny: Every user comment on reddit has about 3.4 KB of HTML overhead (<div>, in-line javascript, etc), including multiple  comments.

It really adds up for a large thread.

swang• 14 years ago

Can anyone tell which page he loaded specifically? I just loaded the latest status update on my timeline in incognito mode and all it downloaded was ~578kb+ of data.

mrcalzone• 14 years ago

This might be one of the best reasons to have native (mobile) clients. As a web-developer I like the model of writing one web-application to fit all clients, and being able to link to pages etc. But on a slow connection it certainly makes sense not to have to download the GUI before viewing the content. As the author points out, the content from the API is just some hundred bytes.

tripzilch• 14 years ago

Try http://m.twitter.com , it's the dressed-down mobile version of Twitter.

It doesn't have all the features, but easily makes up for that by the fact that you can actually click around as much as you like without your browser getting all slumpy from loading huge pages or doing javascript.

You'd expect caching to help, but there's a lot of truth in the jQuery tax article[1]: even if you got the code cached, executing it all takes a significant amount of time, and the sluggishness is made worse by the fact that during this time your CPU is busy, unlike with data transfers which at most cost some memory.

I don't use the m.twitter.com site all the time, but I switch often enough whenever I get too annoyed by default Twitter's slowness.

The only real downside (for me) is that you can't click through to a full resolution version of a profile picture. Otherwise all the basic features are in there.

[1] http://samsaffron.com/archive/2012/02/17/stop-paying-your-jq...

keeperofdakeys• 14 years ago

It takes 3-5 seconds for my rather powerful laptop to 'build' a twitter page after it has loaded (since it is doing AJAX etc), and this is warm. This is also on a rather fast internet connection, in the latest firefox and chrome. Compare this to Facebook - which has enough javascript to make it slow on my netbook - it loads almost instantaneously under the same circumstances, even when performing AJAX requests.

rajpaul• 14 years ago

I tried to use the twitter mobile site. I'll never do it again because it takes too long to load.

This is why people use the twitter app instead of the site.

ahoyhere• 14 years ago

In Q1 2007, my husband and I were invited to Twitter HQ for a meeting -- I was pitching a visualization project, my husband (renowned JS developer Thomas Fuchs) was proposing that we fix their horrible front-end performance issues (both page load & laggy JS code). We met with ev, some of the team, and the new CTO at the time. They nodded and agreed it was important. It would only take about 2 days of consulting. They later said "We can't get it together to hire you." Not due to the money (only a few grand, really), but about what you might call "political will."

Their front-end performance situation has sadly never gotten better… and has definitely gotten worse.

We started to build the visualization project anyway, and it got us a little bit of fame and a lot of consulting work: http://twistori.com

And just under a year later, we published a book on front-end performance: http://jsrocks.com

But I still wish we could have fixed their damn front end. Every time somebody tweets a link to a tweet and it opens up as a web page on my iPhone and I have to watch a blank screen for 10 freaking seconds before the tweet actually shows up, I die a little inside.

This story amuses & horrifies people who believe that startups are more flexible, responsive, & sane than big companies. At this time, Twitter the company was definitely smaller than 30 people… around 15 if memory serves, but I'm not sure. It was definitely small, either way. Meanwhile Twitter the site was growing in popularity by leaps & bounds every second. I'm sure the bandwidth saved alone would have paid back our consulting fees in a matter of a few weeks, or less.

loceng• 14 years ago

Without knowing the internal details it sounds like there's some fear locking out change-making decisions.

tzury• 14 years ago

Well, I measured that with chrome and it wasn't 2MB rather ~450 KB.

Talking about 140 chars is irrelevant, a tweet, is a 140 (unicode) chars handler for a (mini social) graph, and this is how we should look at it.

In that particular page he's talking about[1] there are 10 profiles info (status owner + 9 retweeters) embedded within the page so when you click on a profile thumbnail you get the profile modal with some basic info and "Follow" button etc.

381Kb out of those 450 belongs to his own background image [2].

In other words, twitter does a very good job at making their service fast and speedy.

1. https://twitter.com/#!/bos31337/status/172156922491969536

2. https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_background_images/9706...

A single tweet page is 2.0 MB

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