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Improving site performance by shipping more CSS

96 points · 72 comments · torutofu

  1. meerita · · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know how they perceive the performance. I see 41 network requests. That's 2.1 MB of CSS over the wire, blocking rendering and hurting painting and loading speed. There's 400 KB of Tailwind, 87 KB of general CSS, plus another 200 KB of other general CSS. They need to embrace functional CSS properly. I'm sure they could have a single CSS file under 80 KB that renders everything.
    1. karolusrex · · focus · HN ↗
      These type of comments often come from a place of arm-chair reasoning where you might not sit on the experience of working hands-on in a large team on a large product. While it’s probably true that X kB sufficient, that amount of performance optimisation is usually not warranted at this scale. Maintaining a design system, working with scoped classes, legacy code, and dealing with the complexities of chunking and probably further challenges we are not aware of from the outside. It seems like a common sentiment on HN (maybe not you in particular) is that engineers should drop everything and work overtime on optimizing performance, when it comes to web apps
      1. meerita · · focus · HN ↗
        The beauty of functional CSS is that you can progressively transform everything. GitHub runs on entire modularized codebase, they can clean up the entire codebase within weeks, days if they use agents and see the effects of performance instantly.
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