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Theoretical Questions about Page Load & Speed

Hi,

I have some rather odd questions:

1. Is there a hard (or somewhat-hard) limit on the number of HTML elements (no css, no scripts) a webpage can load on a browser?

2. What does the webpage loading time (and potential limit) depend on?

3. How much does HTML attributes styling “burden” page load?

4. How much does CSS “burden” page load compared to HTML-only?

5. Can the browser handle pages with more than 10,000,000 (10 million) elements? What about 20 million? More?

6. How much do performance vary from browser to browser?

7. How much does user hardware affect the limitations and speed?

8. How much does server hardware affect the limitations and speed?

I’m sorry if my questions come up idiotic or the very least odd, I’m trying to understand how a page can generate objects and how much clean code helps with speed.

Thank you very much in advance for your patience and help!

Regards,

Georgi

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 20:23:35
  • Kasia Swiderska
    • Support nomad

    Hello Georgi,

    I will be honest with you. I don’t know answer for all those questions – they are theoretical, but in college on IT department we had different theory :slight_frown: no one cared about browsers and websites.

    So I did small research and found some interesting thread:

    1. Is there a hard (or somewhat-hard) limit on the number of HTML elements (no css, no scripts) a webpage can load on a browser?

    5. Can the browser handle pages with more than 10,000,000 (10 million) elements? What about 20 million? More?

    6. How much do performance vary from browser to browser?

    7. How much does user hardware affect the limitations and speed?

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21611822/how-many-html-elements-can-modern-browsers-handle-at-once

    3. How much does HTML attributes styling “burden” page load?

    Each character increase page weight. Page that is 1kB will load much more faster than 22MB. Yes, you can make 22MB html document with only text. It will be huge and it will load slowly.

    4. How much does CSS “burden” page load compared to HTML-only?

    That is another file that has to be downloaded. So you are adding another 10kB to your site (for example). So on quick internet connection it will be faster than on slower, weak server will serve those slower than good one.

    8. How much does server hardware affect the limitations and speed?

    Weak shared servers will server websites slower than good server. You can check on our blog articles on how changing server improved site speed.

    https://wpmudev.com/blog/faster-with-cloudways-wpmu-dev/

    https://wpmudev.com/blog/why-trying-to-get-95-on-google-pagespeed-insights-will-drive-you-mad/

    I suggest asking this type of question on our members forum https://wpmudev.com/forums/forum/members – probably there is more people there that will share their experience in this matter.

    I personally never explored that subject.

    kind regards,

    Kasia