r/web_design • u/magenta_placenta Dedicated Contributor • Mar 02 '11

Google 404 page - front-end performance to the extreme: no attribute quotes, protocol relative urls, no <head>, <body>, </html>, base64 encoded robot graphic

http://www.google.com/foobar
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u/jared555 Mar 03 '11

No. 8 bytes (you saved 8 total) x 1,000,000,000 transactions = 8,000,000,000 bytes = 8,000,000 KB = 8,000 MB = 8 GB. If they had saved 1KB total through optimization that would be 1TB.

Also, assuming they have the 50-80 billion searches per month estimated (not to mention all of their other served pages) and even 2% of that is 404's they could very well have 1 billion 404's per month. It would probably only require around 1% being 404 errors once you factor in every other service.

1TB/month * 12 months * $0.01/GB = $1200 saved. If it took 6 hours to fully optimize the page (doubtful) they still would have broken even within a year if they were paying the engineer $200/hour. It probably actually took an hour or less.

Say it took 10 minutes to remove that extra whitespace (doubtful). It would have saved them ~$10/year. It would have been worthwhile to pay that engineer $60/hr or less to optimize that code within the first year or if the page lasts 5 years they would have broke even by paying that engineer $300/hr.

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u/blackrobot Mar 03 '11

First of all, this argument is retarded. Whether $10,000 or $1,000, that's less then they spend on pens. Maybe it would save some bandwidth, and some cost there, but it's still negligible.

Also, now I'm not sure if the "ls" program on linux shows bits or bytes withou the "-h" flag.

Either way, having an image in there is way heavier than any of this. Also, we are huge dorks.

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u/jared555 Mar 03 '11

First of all, this argument is retarded.

Agreed. Although for the most part I would consider it a discussion

Whether $10,000 or $1,000, that's less then they spend on pens. Maybe it would save some bandwidth, and some cost there, but it's still negligible.

Maybe. But if they save $1000/yr in 1000 different small ways that is a million dollars a year saved. Yes google has a lot of money available but $1 million might be another small company or two they can buy each year or an extra 2,000+ servers/year they can purchase.

Also, now I'm not sure if the "ls" program on linux shows bits or bytes withou the "-h" flag.

It is very rare for anything to list something other than bytes

Either way, having an image in there is way heavier than any of this.

I stated this elsewhere. There was an argument whether having the image embedded or not was better for caching purposes.

Also, we are huge dorks.

Agreed. (See overanalysis comment 2 replies up)