Reducing the size of the YouTube page loading What you understood by advancing "Project Feather"

ByJim Champion

As internet related functions and web contents become sophisticated and complicated, it can be said that it is difficult to avoid increasing the size of code to realize the function. Therefore, as a project to reduce the weight of the client side (browser side) code necessary for playing YouTube was advanced, it turned out to be a surprising fact.

Page Weight Matters
http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Once used to develop YouTubeChris ZakariasOne day, he came across a scene where his boss was showing anger at the YouTube office. Though the page weight (capacity) has expanded to 1.2 MB due to the functions necessary for playing the movie in the browser, dissatisfied with sending a very large number of requests (requests) to the web server Although it was, Zakarias who agreed with this is going to be involved in the very lightweight page development project "Feather" with capacity of 100 KB or less, narrowing down the functions of the page.

Mr. Zacharias worked in the bus back to home and said he wrote the original code for the page. In order to pursue light weight, the function of the page is designed to be simple such as "movie reproduction", "only 5 related movies to display" "share function" "flag function" "only 10 comments" The entire page isAjaxIt seems that it was supposed to be provided by.

ByRazi Marysol Machay

Despite pursuing light weight, the page weight at this stage will be 250 KB. Mr. Zacharias who decided that further weight reduction is impossible even with various optimization tools has entered the task of locating and removing unnecessary parts of the code by hand with his own hands. Feather that manually optimized CSS, JavaScript, etc. over 3 days did not reach 100 KB, but it was Feather that I installed my own HTML 5 video player instead of the Flash Player I used before We succeeded in reducing the capacity to 98 KB below 100 KB. Zakarias implements a simple monitoring tool to test some users and gather data, with the simplicity that the page sends only 14 requests.

Zakarias who analyzed the data collected over the week is impacted by the result. The fact that page latency (delay) caused by introducing Feather did not decrease, but rather turned out to have increased. Zakarias continued the detailed investigation that Mr. Zacharias said that despite dramatically reducing the page weight and reducing the number of requests by a factor of 10, this result was shocked. I could not get a satisfactory answer. It was Mr. Zakarias who was giving up on too much inexplicability, but my colleague said "Geographical factorsIt seems that all the mysteries are to be unraveled from noticing the keyword ''.

ByNicolas Raymond

Zakarias et al. Plotted the data by geography and searched for the actual situation, it became clear that the numerical values ​​increased especially in the remote areas of Southeast Asia, South America, Africa and Siberia. As a result of investigating the details, it turned out that it took more than 2 minutes to load a Feather page that was lightweight less than 100 KB in these areas. At this pace, it took more than 20 minutes to load a regular YouTube page, and I know that it was not quite acceptable for appreciation.

If it takes 20 minutes before downloading the data body of the movie, this is not very practical. As a result, watching YouTube in these areas was not a realistic option, but if Feather is made lightweight, movie playback will become reality. Even if it takes 2 minutes to load for the first time, there is something like a twist phenomenon that rumors that "You can watch YouTube if it is Feather" spread among the people of the area, resulting in an increase in page latency That was the fact that things were.

Through this one thing, Mr. Zakarias realized that the world still has a blessed area in the broadband environment. For those users who live in an area where the Internet environment is not maintained, these contents are "unavailable" although the contents of the page become somewhat unnoticed if it gets accustomed to a very high-speed internet environment It becomes the content which becomes the content which is excluded from the option itself itself. As a result, Mr. Zacharias appealed to the importance of keeping the code on the client side light and light, and to prepare an environment where contents can be used in a wide area of ​​the world.

ByFairuz othman