Peterbe.com

Back in 2012, I did an experiment to compare if and/or how much faster WebSockets are compared to AJAX (aka. XHR). It would be a "protocol benchmark" to see which way was faster to schlep data back and forth between a server and a browser in total. The conclusion of that experiment was that WebSockets were faster but when you take latency into account, the difference was minimal. Considering the added "complexities" of WebSockets (keeping connections, results don't come where the request was made, etc.) it's not worth it.

But, 7 years later browsers are very different. Almost all browsers that support JavaScript also support WebSockets. HTTP/2 might make things better too. And perhaps the WebSocket protocol is just better implemented in the browsers. Who knows? An experiment knows.

So I made a new experiment with similar tech. The gist of the code is best explained with some code:

// Inside App.js

loopXHR = async count => {
  const res = await fetch(`/xhr?count=${count}`);
  const data = await res.json();
  const nextCount = data.count;
  if (nextCount) {
    this.loopXHR(nextCount);
  } else {
    this.endXHR();
  }
};

Basically, pick a big number (e.g. 100) and send that integer to the server which does this:

# Inside app.py 

# from the the GET querystring "?count=123"
count = self.get_argument("count")   
data = {"count": int(count) - 1}
self.write(json.dumps(data))

So the browser keeps sending the number back to the server that decrements it and when the server returns 0 the loop ends and you look how long the whole thing took.

Try It

The code is here: https://github.com/peterbe/sockshootout2019

And the demo app is here: https://sockshootout.app (Just press "Start!", wait and press it 2 or 3 more times)

Location, location, location

What matters is the geographical distance between you and the server. The server used in this experiment is in New York, USA.

What you'll find is that the closer you are to the server (lower latency) the better WebSocket performs. Here's what mine looks like:

My result between South Carolina, USA and New York, USA

Now, when I run the whole experiment all on my laptop the results look very different:

Running all locally

I don't have a screenshot for it but a friend of mine ran this from his location in Perth, Australia. There was no difference. If any difference it was "noise".

Same Conclusion?

Yes, latency matters most. The technique, for the benefit of performance, doesn't matter much.

No matter how fancy you're trying to be, what matters is the path the bytes have to travel. Or rather, the distance the bytes have to travel. If you're far away a large majority of the total time is sending and receiving the data. Not the time it takes the browser (or the server) to process it.

However, suppose you do have all your potential clients physically near the server, it might be beneficial to use WebSockets.

Thoughts and Conclusions

My original thought was to use WebSockets instead of XHR for an autocomplete widget. At almost every keystroke, you send it to the server and as search results come in, you update the search result display. Things like that need to be fast and "snappy". But that's not where WebSockets shine. They shine in their ability to actively await results without having a loop that periodically pulls. There's nothing wrong with WebSocket and it has its brilliant use cases.

In summary, don't bother just to get a single-digit percentage performance increase if the complexity of the code and infrastructure is non-trivial. Keep building cool stuff with WebSockets but if you expect one result per action, XHR is good enough.

Bonus

The experiment app does collect everyone's results (just the timings and IP) and I hope to find the time to process this and build graph a correlating the geographical distance compared to the difference between the two techniques. Watch this space!

By the way, if you do plan on writing some WebSocket implementation code I highly recommend Sockette. It's solid and easy to use.

A couple of months ago my colleague Michael @mythmon Cooper wanted to add a feature to the front-end code of Whatsdeployed and learned that the whole front-end is spaghetti jQuery code. So, instead, he re-wrote it in React. My only requirements were "Use create-react-app and no redux", i.e. keep it simple.

We also took the opportunity to rewrite some of the ways that URLs are handled. It used to be that a "short link" would redirect. For example GET /s-5HY would return 302 to Location: ?org=mozilla&repo=tecken&name[]=Dev&url[]=https://symbols.dev.mozaws.net/__version__&name[]=Stage... Basically, the short link was just an alias for a redirect. Just like those services like bit.ly or g.co. Now, the short link is a permanent fixture. The short link is included in the XHR calls to the server for getting the relevant data.

All old URLs will continue to work but now the canonical URL becomes /s/5HY/mozilla-services/tecken, for example. The :org/:repo isn't really necessary because the server knows exactly what 5HY (in this example means), but it's nice for the URL bar's memory.

Another thing that changed was how it can recognize "bors commits". When you use bors, you put a bunch of commits into a GitHub Pull Request and then ask the bors bot to merge them into master. Using "bors mode" in Whatsdeployed is optional but we believe it looks a lot more user-friendly. Here is an example of mozilla/normandy with and without bors toggled on and off.

Without "bors mode"

With "bors mode"

Thank you mythmon!

Lastly, hopefully this will make it a lot easier to contribute. Check out https://github.com/peterbe/whatsdeployed. All you need is Python 3, a PostgreSQL, and almost any version of Node that can run create-react-apps. Ping me if you find it hard to get up and running.

In a highly unscientific survey of exactly 2 French native friends, I asked them what they think about formatting large numbers the "French way" versus doing it the "English way". In particular, if the rest of content/app is English, would it be jarring if the formatting of numbers was French. Both Adrian and Mathieu said they prefer displaying the number the French way even if the app/content is French.

If you have an English browser opening https://codepen.io/peterbe/pen/xBRGoN means it's going to display the two numbers the same way. But if you have a French locale in your browser it'll look like this:

Number.toLocaleString() is now universally supported so that's no longer a worry.

For years I was using a function like this:

/* http://stackoverflow.com/a/2901298 */
function numberWithCommas(x) {
  var parts = x.toString().split('.');
  parts[0] = parts[0].replace(/\B(?=(\d{3})+(?!\d))/g, ',');
  return parts.join('.');
}

numberWithCommas(100000000);
// "100,000,000"

and it works and is reasonably fast too but it's so tempting to not use and instead stand on the shoulder-of-browsers to supply this functionality instead. But consider the alternative:

(100000000).toLocaleString();
// "100,000,000"

The thing that's always worried me is; What will someone's reaction be if the texts are in one locale and the formatting of numbers (and dates, etc!) are in another locale?

All 2 of the people I asked say they don't mind the mixing but admit that it's weird but that ultimately they prefer "their" format.

If you're non-English browser, what do you prefer? If you're a web usability expert, please, too, drop a comment to share what you think.

1. Create a create-react-app first:

create-react-app myapp

2. Enter it and install node-sass and bulmaswatch

cd myapp
yarn add bulma bulmaswatch node-sass

3. Edit the src/index.js to import index.scss instead:

-import "./index.css";
+import "./index.scss";

4. "Rename" the index.css file:

git rm src/index.css 
touch src/index.scss
git add src/index.scss

5. Now edit the src/index.scss to look like this:

@import "node_modules/bulmaswatch/darkly/bulmaswatch";

This assumes your favorite theme was the darkly one. You can obviously change that later.

6. Run the app:

BROWSER=none yarn start

7. Open the browser at http://localhost:3000

That's it! However, the create-react-app default look doesn't expose any of the cool stuff that Bulma can style. So let's rewrite our src/App.js by copying the minimal starter HTML from the Bulma documentation. So make the src/App.js component look something like this:

class App extends Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <section className="section">
        <div className="container">
          <h1 className="title">Hello World</h1>
          <p className="subtitle">
            My first website with <strong>Bulma</strong>!
          </p>
        </div>
      </section>
    );
  }
}

Now it'll look like this:

Yes, it's not much but it's a great start. Over to you to take this to infinity and beyond!

Not So Secret Sauce

In the rushed instructions above the choice of theme was darkly. But what you need to do next is go to https://jenil.github.io/bulmaswatch/, click around and eventually pick the one you like. Suppose you like spacelab, then you just change that @import ... line to be:

@import "node_modules/bulmaswatch/spacelab/bulmaswatch";

TEMPORARY:

h1 {  
    color: red;
    font-size: 5em;
}

TEST CHANGE 3.

tl;dr; minimalcss 0.8.2 introduces a 20% post-processing optimization by lumping many CSS selectors to their parent CSS selectors as a pre-emptive cache.

In minimalcss the general core of it is that it downloads a DOM tree, as HTML, parses it and parses all the CSS stylesheets associated. These might be from <link ref="stylesheet"> or <style> tags.
Once the CSS stylesheets are turned into an AST it loops over each and every CSS selector and asks a simple question; "Does this CSS selector exist in the DOM?". The equivalent is to open your browser's Web Console and type:

>>> document.querySelectorAll('div.foo span.bar b').length > 0
false

For each of these lookups (which is done with cheerio by the way), minimalcss reduces the CSS, as an AST, and eventually spits the AST back out as a CSS string. The only problem is; it's slow. In the case of view-source:https://semantic-ui.com/ in the CSS it uses, there are 6,784 of them. What to do?

First of all, there isn't a lot you can do. This is the work that needs to be done. But one thing you can do is be smart about which selectors you look at and use a "decision cache" to pre-emptively draw conclusions. So, if this is what you have to check:

1. #example .alternate.stripe
2. #example .theming.stripe
3. #example .solid .column p b
4. #example .solid .column p

As you process the first one you extract that the parent CSS selector is #example and if that doesn't exist in the DOM, you can efficiently draw conclusion about all preceeding selectors that all start with #example .... Granted, if they call exist you will pay a penalty of doing an extra lookup. But that's the trade-off that this optimization is worth.

Check out the comments where I tested a bloated page that uses Semantic-UI before and after. Instead of doing 3,285 of these document.querySelector(selector) calls, it's now able too come to the exact same conclusion with just 1,563 lookups.

Sadly, the majority of the time spent processing lies in network I/O and other overheads but this work did reduce something that used to take 6.3s (median) too 5.1s (median).

React 16.8.0 with Hooks was released today. A big deal. Executive summary; components as functions is all the rage now.

What used to be this:

class MyComponent extends React.Component {
  ...

  componentDidMount() {
    ...
  }
  componentDidUpdate() {
    ...
  }

  render() { STUFF }
}

...is now this:

function MyComponent() {
  ...

  React.useEffect(() => {
    ...
  })

  return STUFF
}

Inside the useEffect "side-effect callback" you can actually update state. But if you do, and this is no different that old React.Component.componentDidUpdate, it will re-run the side-effect callback. Here's a simple way to cause an infinite recursion:

// DON'T DO THIS

function MyComponent() {
  const [counter, setCounter] = React.useState(0);

  React.useEffect(() => {
    setCounter(counter + 1);
  })

  return <p>Forever!</p>
}

The trick is to pass a second argument to React.useEffect that is a list of states to exclusively run on.

Here's how to fix the example above:

function MyComponent() {
  const [counter, setCounter] = React.useState(0);
  const [times, setTimes] = React.useState(0);

  React.useEffect(
    () => {
      if (times % 3 === 0) {
        setCounter(counter + 1);
      }
    },
    [times]  // <--- THIS RIGHT HERE IS THE KEY!
  );

  return (
    <div>
      <p>
        Divisible by 3: {counter}
        <br />
        Times: {times}
      </p>
      <button type="button" onClick={e => setTimes(times + 1)}>
        +1
      </button>
    </div>
  );
}

You can see it in this demo.

Note, this isn't just about avoiding infinite recursion. It can also be used to fit your business logic and/or an optimization to avoid executing the effect too often.

tl;dr; You can use error instanceof window.Response to distinguish between fetch exceptions and fetch responses.

When you do something like...

const response = await fetch(URL);

...two bad things can happen.

1. The XHR request fails entirely. I.e. there's not even a response with a HTTP status code.
2. The response "worked" but the HTTP status code was not to your liking.

Either way, your React app needs to deal with this. Ideally in a not-too-clunky way. So here is one take on this challenge/opportunity which I hope can inspire you to extend it the way you need it to go.

The trick is to "clump" exceptions with responses. Then you can do this:

function ShowServerError({ error }) {
  if (!error) {
    return null;
  }
  return (
    <div className="alert">
      <h3>Server Error</h3>
      {error instanceof window.Response ? (
        <p>
          <b>{error.status}</b> on <b>{error.url}</b>
          <br />
          <small>{error.statusText}</small>
        </p>
      ) : (
        <p>
          <code>{error.toString()}</code>
        </p>
      )}
    </div>
  );
}

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to use if (error instanceof window.Reponse) {. Then you know that error thing is the outcome of THIS = await fetch(URL) (or fetch(URL).then(THIS) if you prefer). Another good trick the devil pulled was to be aware that exceptions, when asked to render in React does not naturally call its .toString() so you have to do that yourself with {error.toString()}.

This codesandbox demonstrates it quite well. (Although, at the time of writing, codesandbox will spew warnings related to testing React components in the console log. Ignore that.)

If you can't open that codesandbox, here's the gist of it:

React.useEffect(() => {
  url &&
    (async () => {
      let response;
      try {
        response = await fetch(url);
      } catch (ex) {
        return setServerError(ex);
      }
      if (!response.ok) {
        return setServerError(response);
      }
      // do something here with `await response.json()`
    })(url);
}, [url]);

By the way, another important trick is to be subtle with how you put the try { and } catch(ex) {.

// DON'T DO THIS

try {
  const response = await fetch(url);
  if (!response.ok) {
    setServerError(response);
  }
  // do something here with `await response.json()`
} catch (ex) {
  setServerError(ex);
}

Instead...

// DO THIS

let response;
try {
  response = await fetch(url);
} catch (ex) {
  return setServerError(ex);
}
if (!response.ok) {
  return setServerError(response);
}
// do something here with `await response.json()`

If you don't do that you risk catching other exceptions that aren't exclusively the fetch() call. Also, notice the use of return inside the catch block which will exit the function early leaving you the rest of the code (de-dented 1 level) to deal with the happy-path response object.

Be aware that the test if (!response.ok) is simplistic. It's just a shorthand for checking if the "status in the range 200 to 299, inclusive". Realistically getting a response.status === 400 isn't an "error" really. It might just be a validation error hint from a server, and likely the await response.json() will work and contain useful information. No need to throw up a toast or a flash message that the communication with the server failed.

Conclusion

The details matter. You might want to deal with exceptions entirely differently from successful responses with bad HTTP status codes. It's nevertheless important to appreciate two things:

1. Handle complete fetch() failures and feed your UI or your retry mechanisms.

2. You can, in one component distinguish between a "successful" fetch() call and thrown JavaScript exceptions.

When Immer first came out I was confused. I kinda understood what I was reading but I couldn't really see what was so great about it. As always, nothing beats actual code you type yourself to experience how something works.

Here is, I believe, a great example: https://codesandbox.io/s/y2m399pw31

If you're reading this on your mobile it might be hard to see what it does. Basically, it's a very simple React app that displays a "todo list like" thing. The state (aka. this.state.tasks) is a pure JavaScript array. The React components that display the data (e.g. <List tasks={this.state.tasks}/> and <ShowItem item={item} />) are pure (i.e. extends React.PureComponent) meaning React natively protects from re-rendering a component when the props haven't changed. So no wasted render-cycles.

What Immer does is that it helps mutate an object in a smart way. I'm sure you've heard that you're never supposed to mutate state objects (arrays are a form of mutable objects too!) and instead do things like const stuff = Object.assign({}, this.state.stuff); or const things = this.state.things.slice(0);. However, those things are shallow copies meaning any mutable objects within (i.e. nested objects) don't get the clone treatment and can thus cause problems with not re-rendering when they should.

Here's the core gist:

import React from "react";
import produce from "immer";

class App extends React.Component {
  state = {
    tasks: [[false, { text: "Do something", date: new Date() }]]
  };
  onToggleDone = (i, done) => {
    // Immer
    // This is what the blog post is all about...
    const tasks = produce(this.state.tasks, draft => {
      draft[i][0] = done;
      draft[i][1].date = new Date();
    });

    // Pure JS
    // Don't do this!
    // const tasks = this.state.tasks.slice(0);
    // tasks[i][0] = done;
    // tasks[i][1].date = new Date();

    this.setState({ tasks });
  };
  render() {
    // appreviated, but...
    return <List tasks={this.state.tasks}/>
  }
}

class List extends React.PureComponent {
   ...

It just works. Neat!

By the way, here's a code sandbox that accomplishes the same thing but with ImmutableJS which I think is uglier. I think it's uglier because now the rendering components need to be aware that it's rendering immutable.Map objects instead.

Caveats

1. The cost of doing what immer.produce isn't free. It's some smart work that needs to be done. But the alternative is to deep clone the object which is going to be much slower. Immer isn't the fastest kid on the block but unlike MobX and ImmutableJS once you've done this smart stuff you're back to plain JavaScript objects.

2. Careful with doing something like console.log(draft) since it will raise a TypeError in your web console. Just be aware of that or use console.log(JSON.stringify(draft)) instead.

3. If you know with confidence that your mutable object does not, and will not, have nested mutable objects you can use object spread, Object.assign(), or .slice(0) and save yourself the trouble of another dependency.

tl;dr; Use Number.prototype.toString() to display percentages that might be floating point numbers.

I started writing a complicated solution but as I discovered corner cases and surprised I was brutally forced to do some research and actually read some documentation. Turns out Number.prototype.toString(), with the precision argument omitted, is the ideal solution.

The application I was working on has an input field to type in a percentage. I.e. a number between 0 and 100. But whatever the user types in, we store the number in decimal. So, if the user typed in "10" into the input widget, we actually store it as 0.1 in the database. Most people will type in a whole number (aka. an integer) like "12" or "5" but some people actually need more precision so they might type in "0.2%" which means 0.002 stored in the backend database.

But the widget is a React controlled component meaning it's value prop needs to be potentially formatted to what gives the best user experience. If the user types in whole numbers set the value prop to a whole number. If the user types in floating point numbers set the value prop type a floating point number with the "matching formatting".

I started writing an overly complicated function that tries to figure out how many decimal-points the user typed in. For example 0.123 is 3 because parseInt(0.123 * 10 ** 3, 10) === 0.123 * 10 ** 3. But, that approach doesn't work because of floating point arithmetic and the rounding problem. For example 103441 !== 10.3441 * (10 ** 4) === 103440.99999999999. So, don't look for a number to pass into .toFixed().

Turns out Number.prototype.toString() is all you need. If you omit the precision argument, it figures out how many significant digits to use based on the input. It's best explained with some examples:

> (33).toString()
"33"
> (33.3).toString()
"33.3"
> (33.10000).toString()
"33.1"
> (10.3441).toString()
"10.3441"

Perfect!

Next level stuff

So actually, it's a bit more complicated than that. You see, the number stored in the backend database might be 0.007 which you and I know as "0.7%" but be warned:

> 0.008 * 100
0.8
> 0.007 * 100
0.7000000000000001

You know, because of floating-point arithmetic, which every high-level software engineer remembers understanding one time years ago but now know just to watch out for.

So if you use the toString() on that you'd get...

> var backendPercentage = 0.007
> (100 * backendPercentage).toString() + '%'
"0.700000000000001%"

Ouch! So how to solve that? Use Math.round(number * 100) / 100 to get rid of those rounding errors. Apparently, it's very fast too. So, now combine this with the toString():

> var backendPercentage = 0.007
> (Math.round(100 * backendPercentage * 100) / 100).toString() + '%'
"0.7%"

Perfect!

React Hooks isn't here yet but when it comes I'll be all over that, replacing many of my classes with functions.

However, as of React 16.6 there's this awesome new React.memo() thing which is such a neat solution. Why didn't I think of that, myself, sooner?!

Anyway, one of the subtle benefits of it is that writing functions minify a lot better than classes when Babel'ifying your ES6 code.

To test that, I took one of my project's classes, which needed to be "PureComponent":

class ShowAutocompleteSuggestionSong extends React.PureComponent {
  render() {
    const { song } = this.props;
    return (
      <div className="media autocomplete-suggestion-song">
        <div className="media-left">
          <img
            className={
              song.image && song.image.preview
                ? 'img-rounded lazyload preview'
                : 'img-rounded lazyload'
            }
            src={
              song.image && song.image.preview
                ? song.image.preview
                : placeholderImage
            }
            data-src={
              song.image ? absolutifyUrl(song.image.url) : placeholderImage
            }
            alt={song.name}
          />
        </div>
        <div className="media-body">
          <h5 className="artist-name">
            <b>{song.name}</b>
            {' by '}
            <span>{song.artist.name}</span>
          </h5>
          {song.fragments.map((fragment, i) => {
            return <p key={i} dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: fragment }} />;
          })}
        </div>
      </div>
    );
  }
}

Minified it weights 1,893 bytes and looks like this:

Minified PureComponent class

When re-written with React.memo it looks like this:

const ShowAutocompleteSuggestionSong = React.memo(({ song }) => {
  return (
    <div className="media autocomplete-suggestion-song">
      <div className="media-left">
        <img
          className={
            song.image && song.image.preview
              ? 'img-rounded lazyload preview'
              : 'img-rounded lazyload'
          }
          src={
            song.image && song.image.preview
              ? song.image.preview
              : placeholderImage
          }
          data-src={
            song.image ? absolutifyUrl(song.image.url) : placeholderImage
          }
          alt={song.name}
        />
      </div>
      <div className="media-body">
        <h5 className="artist-name">
          <b>{song.name}</b>
          {' by '}
          <span>{song.artist.name}</span>
        </h5>
        {song.fragments.map((fragment, i) => {
          return <p key={i} dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: fragment }} />;
        })}
      </div>
    </div>
  );
});

Minified it weights 783 bytes and looks like this:

Minified React.memo function

Highly scientific measurement. Yeah, I know. (Joking)
Perhaps it's stating the obvious but part of the ES5 code that it generates, from classes can be reused for other classes.

Anyway, it's neat and worth considering to squeeze some bytes out. And the bonus is that it gets you prepared for Hooks in React 16.7.