Why your website should be under 14kB in size
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Optimizing Web Performance Through TCP Slow Start and the 14KB Limit
Achieve dramatic loading speed improvements by manipulating network initial congestion controls. Understanding TCP Slow Start directly dictates how quickly your users see content, especially on challenging networks.
Short Summary
- Calculate significant loading time savings (up to 612ms) by keeping initial website payloads under 14 kilobytes.
- TCP Slow Start governs initial data transmission, iteratively testing network capacity via Acknowledgements (ACKs).
- Latency, not just bandwidth, severely penalizes users on high-latency links like satellite connections.
- Applying this initial data constraint remains critical even when using modern protocols like HTTP/3 (QUIC).
This discussion breaks down the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) fundamentals, focusing specifically on the Slow Start algorithm servers use to estimate network bandwidth during the initial connection handshake. Mastering this concept allows developers to prioritize critical resources so that the first 14KB transmitted provides immediate, useful rendering for the visitor, maximizing perceived performance regardless of modern protocol adoption.
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Top Comments (10)
Working on optimization of experience for users on satellite internet, I can tell that most of the web devs have no clue about networking. Today's internet bandwidth is mostly consumed by a bloat.
remember that Apple website that was essentially empty but contained a background image of over 30Mb in size.
I've optimized my website under 1kb. It reads: "<under construction, 2001>"
Big websites are a form of protection from ai scrapers cause there won’t be enough memory on an OpenAI server for a 192gb react webpage
Yeah but they now love react and 4gb of js libs
I have not the slightest clue about web development (am only self-taught hobby programmer doing mostly maths related stuff in C/C++), but I know that somewhere we have taken a wrong turn when I open a newspage and it takes like 3-4 seconds to build up the page with 100Mbps internet connection.
Just remember, if you're serving third party ads, nothing you do will make your page perform well.
"we should have always been counting bytes" - absolutely. Back in the day, when storage was at a premium, every byte counted - we wrote programs for all three types of efficiency: compute, transmission, and storage. within 14k - sure, definitely do-able. Looking at my own site, my homepage is 22kB and I'm already identifying ways to bring that down - 33% seems do-able.
damn, that font style in orange color made me think I'm tripping.
My C Professor wrote the entire CS page for the University in C. It never died and loaded immediately but looked like like it was from the 90s
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Top Comments (10)
Working on optimization of experience for users on satellite internet, I can tell that most of the web devs have no clue about networking. Today's internet bandwidth is mostly consumed by a bloat.
remember that Apple website that was essentially empty but contained a background image of over 30Mb in size.
I've optimized my website under 1kb. It reads: "<under construction, 2001>"
Big websites are a form of protection from ai scrapers cause there won’t be enough memory on an OpenAI server for a 192gb react webpage
Yeah but they now love react and 4gb of js libs
I have not the slightest clue about web development (am only self-taught hobby programmer doing mostly maths related stuff in C/C++), but I know that somewhere we have taken a wrong turn when I open a newspage and it takes like 3-4 seconds to build up the page with 100Mbps internet connection.
Just remember, if you're serving third party ads, nothing you do will make your page perform well.
"we should have always been counting bytes" - absolutely. Back in the day, when storage was at a premium, every byte counted - we wrote programs for all three types of efficiency: compute, transmission, and storage. within 14k - sure, definitely do-able. Looking at my own site, my homepage is 22kB and I'm already identifying ways to bring that down - 33% seems do-able.
damn, that font style in orange color made me think I'm tripping.
My C Professor wrote the entire CS page for the University in C. It never died and loaded immediately but looked like like it was from the 90s