Chris Hates Writing • Small things add up

Chris Poole – Small things add up:

By migrating to the new domain, end users now save roughly 100 KB upstream per page load, which at 500 million pageviews per month adds up to 46 terabytes per month in savings for our users. I find this unreal. Just by moving images to a domain that doesn’t have cookies. Impressive, especially given that users upload data significantly slower than they download it and HTTP 1.1 headers are sent uncompressed. Important to note however:

Are these optimizations the first place to start? No, certainly not—the reason we made them is we had exhausted almost every other page performance trick. But at the scale of large sites like 4chan (especially those run on a shoe-string budget!), it’s important to remember: little things do add up. Very few sites are at the scale of 4chan, but I wonder how fast cookie traffic adds up for sites that use things like long poll.