Earlier tonight (using “tonight” loosely) I attended a meetup that hosted an excellent presentation about scaling AngularJS applications, by a guy who obviously knows what he’s talking about. But this post is, more or less, not about that.
It’s about a comment that I made, in response to a question fielded by a co-attendee of the meeting. The question went something like this: “Why is there a performance gain in delivering multiple code files over the wire to the end user’s browser, versus just one, when you’re going from one server to one client? Shouldn’t a single transfer just max out their connection anyway?” My response: “[incomprehensible mumbling] Basically, Internet QoS sucks.”
That’s an oversimplification, but not as far from the truth as you’d expect. Read the rest of this entry »