If your site is one of the world's top three most-visited websites and every pageview generates a single extra request and that brings you down, then like I said you've got bigger problems. Your infrastructure should not be so delicate that the difference between uptime and downtime boils down to a single extra hit per pageview.
I'm doing 500 hits per second right now, do I care if it becomes 600 or 700? Not at all, because that's still a nice, safe, comfortable distance from my maximum capacity.
1. That what I said was hypothetical. It wasn't. This happened.
2. That one pageview amounts to no more effect on a server than causing it to process another request and send a few more bytes down the wire.
If you're serving a static HTML page, then an extra pageview probably isn't a big deal. If you're serving an uncacheable, dynamic page that must federate requests to many, many different backends and pull in live content in real time, one pageview is a big deal.
And even if you have enough capacity to handle 3 or 4 or 10 times your usual load, when dynamic pageviews suddenly double (or worse, if there are multiple sourceless images on the page) for no apparent reason, a whole shitload of alarms go off, and it's not the sort of thing you just ignore. It indicates a Problem. It might be just a Problem right now, but it could very soon become a Big Problem. Which is why you try to fix it right away, no matter how big your safety margin is.
Eh, sucks that it happened to you but looking at browser vendor's (lack of) reaction and even the bugzilla discussion ... I think you and yahoo might be the only ones to have ever had any significant repercussions come from this outside of some minor mobile network performance issue that sparked the bugzilla submission.
Riiight. Because browser vendors always fix important issues quickly. ;)
What's more likely is that very few large sites are experiencing this problem, and of the smaller sites that may have experienced it, many probably never even knew it, and those that knew it probably said "huh, weird", fixed it, and didn't bother mentioning it to anyone.
Nicholas Zakas and Yahoo! are trying to get browsers to actually fix the problem in order to prevent this from happening to other people, while also spreading the word so that people realize this is a potential problem.
One place other than simple server load where this problem could be extremely harmful is in measuring ad impressions. Even if the extra pageviews aren't enough to create a blip on your capacity radar, if you're telling advertisers that you served x-million impressions when only half of those were actually seen by users, it's going to seriously screw up your clickthru metrics, and your advertisers are going to be pretty pissed.
It's not so much that they're slow to respond, it's that they also own many of the ones that would be as susceptible as Yahoo. That combination suggests it's not or has not yet been a problem for most.
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If your site is one of the world's top three most-visited websites and every pageview generates a single extra request and that brings you down, then like I said you've got bigger problems. Your infrastructure should not be so delicate that the difference between uptime and downtime boils down to a single extra hit per pageview.
I'm doing 500 hits per second right now, do I care if it becomes 600 or 700? Not at all, because that's still a nice, safe, comfortable distance from my maximum capacity.
Your "you've got bigger problems" then translates to "you should have capacity for at least double your normal traffic".
Capacity planning is complex enough that I wouldn't make such a blanket statement so judgmentally.
One extra hit per pageview is not necessarily double your traffic, it's probably below a 1% increase a lot of the time.
You seem to have the impression:
1. That what I said was hypothetical. It wasn't. This happened.
2. That one pageview amounts to no more effect on a server than causing it to process another request and send a few more bytes down the wire.
If you're serving a static HTML page, then an extra pageview probably isn't a big deal. If you're serving an uncacheable, dynamic page that must federate requests to many, many different backends and pull in live content in real time, one pageview is a big deal.
And even if you have enough capacity to handle 3 or 4 or 10 times your usual load, when dynamic pageviews suddenly double (or worse, if there are multiple sourceless images on the page) for no apparent reason, a whole shitload of alarms go off, and it's not the sort of thing you just ignore. It indicates a Problem. It might be just a Problem right now, but it could very soon become a Big Problem. Which is why you try to fix it right away, no matter how big your safety margin is.
Eh, sucks that it happened to you but looking at browser vendor's (lack of) reaction and even the bugzilla discussion ... I think you and yahoo might be the only ones to have ever had any significant repercussions come from this outside of some minor mobile network performance issue that sparked the bugzilla submission.
Riiight. Because browser vendors always fix important issues quickly. ;)
What's more likely is that very few large sites are experiencing this problem, and of the smaller sites that may have experienced it, many probably never even knew it, and those that knew it probably said "huh, weird", fixed it, and didn't bother mentioning it to anyone.
Nicholas Zakas and Yahoo! are trying to get browsers to actually fix the problem in order to prevent this from happening to other people, while also spreading the word so that people realize this is a potential problem.
One place other than simple server load where this problem could be extremely harmful is in measuring ad impressions. Even if the extra pageviews aren't enough to create a blip on your capacity radar, if you're telling advertisers that you served x-million impressions when only half of those were actually seen by users, it's going to seriously screw up your clickthru metrics, and your advertisers are going to be pretty pissed.
It's not so much that they're slow to respond, it's that they also own many of the ones that would be as susceptible as Yahoo. That combination suggests it's not or has not yet been a problem for most.