Some thought about Web performance

Web performance sounds very trivial to me until last week. The workshop yesterday is quite impressive and easy to understand. Though some of the techniques are a bit too high-end to us to apply for the final project. I got the basic knowledge about why we want to improve web performance and how we can avoid making bad User Experience.

If an web app is not popular at all, no one cares about how fast it is. But if it's really popular, then people will have higher requirements on it. And it also saves a lot of money. As I'm just a beginner of building web apps, I rarely considered about the web performance before. That results in a lot of waste in resources, rubbish can be found here and there in the codes. The page looks fine, but the errors hidden behind the page slow down the loading process. And the users will be left there looking at the blank page without anything to do. I can understand that people are lazy and impatient when browsing web pages, that's why they usually open several tabs at the same time. Now the users have so many options that they won't wait for your page to be loaded. If they lose their patience, they just close the page and open another one, there is always a alternate way.

The workshop also remind me of something else besides the web performance. As henry said ,"if there are a hundred thousand users who use your app, then saving 1 second for each user means you save a day accumulatively. It sounds amazing, but I thought it is not so amazing for me. Because there are so many other staffs are consuming my time, and that is much more than the 1 second. Most of the waste of time are caused by the so called explosion of information. I think most people who are passive in life are drowned in the information like me. If we passively receive the information,  it will result in a lot of time wasted. So I must change my habit and live more actively.

My browser crashed just now. Thank god, the blogger saves my draft regularly. This is also an example of good User Experience.It saves us much time and make life easier. Ten years ago if we would lost some data while processing, most will take it as the fault of their carelessness. But nowadays that will be a fault of the application or system. We should be more careful doing our final projects now, users are more critical than in the past.