3/15/2026 at 8:47:33 PM
Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once.They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away.
We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit of connection speed, anything more and they just make nonsense out of it.
by PunchyHamster
3/15/2026 at 9:46:27 PM
PSA for those who aren’t aware: Chromium/Firefox-based browsers have a Network tab in the developer tools where you can dial down your bandwidth to simulate a slower 3G or 4G connection.Combined with CPU throttling, it's a decent sanity check to see how well your site will perform on more modest setups.
by vunderba
3/15/2026 at 10:04:56 PM
I once spent around an hour optimizing a feature because it felt slow - turns out that the slower simulated connection had just stayed enabled after a restart (can’t remember if it was just the browser or the OS, but I previously needed it and then later just forgot to turn it off). Good times, useful feature though!by KronisLV
3/15/2026 at 10:09:07 PM
Working as intended!by solarkraft
3/15/2026 at 11:47:57 PM
hahaha - I've done something similar. I had an automated vitest harness running and at one point it ended up leaving a bunch of zombie procs/threads just vampirically leeching the crap out of my resources.I naturally assumed that it was my code that was the problem (because I'm often the programmer equivalent of the Seinfeld hipster doofus) and spent the next few hours optimizing the hell out of it. It turned out to be unnecessary but I'm kind of glad it forced me into that "profiling" mindset.
by vunderba
3/16/2026 at 12:09:05 PM
Have the same story but I forgot to disable tc netem on a server, luckily it was just staging.by rkuska
3/16/2026 at 5:38:27 AM
Imagine the speed of those optimizations once you turned it off. lol. Love it!by reactordev
3/16/2026 at 4:16:42 PM
It's like removing weighted clothingby tech_hutch
3/16/2026 at 1:54:03 AM
I wonder if that works beneficial on old computers that freeze up when you try load the GB js ad-auction circus news circus website. I want to browse loaded pages while the new tabs load. If the client just hangs for 2 min it gets boring fast.by 6510
3/16/2026 at 2:11:07 AM
Datapoint: During the pandemic, I had to use an old 2004 Powerbook G4 12" (256 MB RAM, OS X Leopard). Everything sort of worked and was even reasonably snappy. But open one website, and the machine went down. Unusable. Even if, indeed, I just wanted to read or look up a few kB of text. So painful.by FabHK
3/16/2026 at 2:28:35 AM
One tool I've found useful in low-power/low-bandwidth situations is the Lynx web browser [1]. Used to be installed by default in most Linux distributions but I think that's probably not the case anymore. Wikipedia says its also available on OSX and Windows.by alanning
3/16/2026 at 11:49:22 AM
Chawan is niceby lstodd
3/16/2026 at 3:21:13 AM
Links is a bit more usable than lynx, I found.by eru