I’m writing this from 10,000 meters above the Pacific Ocean1, typing it into a $200 ARM laptop, and I have had a pretty productive workday so far. In fact, with 600-1200ms latency, frequent network drop-outs, and bandwidth which would make a circa-2008 2G network hang its head in shame, I have had endured hardly any discernible difference from my workflow at home.
By objective measures, sourcehut is the fastest and most lightweight software forge2 by a wide margin. I am able to load a git repository on git.sr.ht in about 3 seconds (DOM ready in 1.8s), while GitHub took 38 seconds (DOM ready in 20s)3. Working with any of the sourcehut services — browsing git repos, reading and filing tickets, reviewing build logs — is hardly any different in this situation than it is at my workstation at home. Browsing any other forge, on the other hand, is miserable. In the same amount of time I can load 3 pages on GitHub (one full minute!), I can load more than 30 on sourcehut.
That’s just the network conditions, too. Recall that I mentioned I’m on a cheap ARM laptop, basically a mid-tier chromebook. SourceHut has no mandatory JavaScript, and the pages are very light — almost all of them load in two requests or less, and usually transfer less than 10 KiB, even on a cold cache. It’s easy to render and use sr.ht on any class of hardware. It works half decently in Lynx!
All of that being said, I have only actually used the web services for three or four quick tasks today. SourceHut embraces open standards like email for collaboration. There is no suffering through the pull request review web UI on a craptop with a terrible connection. Patches arrive via email, and I have my mailbox stored locally in a standardized format, which I can read with simple text-based tools, then queue up my review as an emailed reply to be sent asynchronously whenever the network is up for it.
For my part, this is a story that comes from privilege. I am in a self-imposed network drought on an expensive airplane fare, and sourcehut’s performance is simply temporarily convenient. But there are a lot of people for whom this performance is an essential necessity in their daily life. This $200 craptop represents a substantial investment for a lot of people. The luxurious network conditions the developed world enjoys are just that: a developed luxury. I don’t find these users less important simply because their constraints are harder to work in. We pride ourselves on thriving under those constraints.
That ethos pays returns in many ways, like when I’m sitting here on an airplane conducting my work without interruption, or when our simpler HTML is easier to use for the new developer on your team who has to rely on a screen reader. Though at first it may seem that our performance metrics are a flashy footnote, they represent something of real importance to us and to our users, and I hope that the rest of the web catches up with us soon.
-
Fully vaccinated, and wearing a mask, and with a negative COVID-19 test result taken two days ago, for the record. ↩︎
-
These tests are conducted by sourcehut, but are based on independent measurement factors, have held up under independent scrutiny, and are open to improvements from the rest of the community. ↩︎
-
I can get on with my work after the DOM loads, but it’s still asking my browser to suck down images, leeching what precious little bandwidth I have, taking it away from anything else I’m trying to do. ↩︎