Barry Pollard
tunetheweb.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2019
Barry Pollard writes about web performance, including fonts, Lighthouse scores, critical resources, and web security features.
What HN saysHN commenters debate his 14 KB first-packet post, noting it is often abbreviated wrongly and may be less relevant with TLS and HTTP/2; the author updated a 2015 security post.
18HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
19stories submitted
633story points
3 months agolast shared
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
lelandfe · 2026-08-04
That post is so abbreviated as to be wrong in a few places (for instance, it's not that your "HTML" needs to be under 14kB, the packet, incl. headers needs to be). Fuller link: https://www.tunetheweb.com/blog/critical-resources-and-the-first-14kb/
It's not worth chasing except for personal curiosity and some truly extreme cases.
j-krieger · 2022-10-01
Nothing about this looks great. Margins and Paddings feel "off". Heading 6 is too small to read comfortably on desktop (even worse on mobile). The text font is too thin and the entire site feels tiring to read in contrast with the white background. The entire content column is only 600 pixels wide on my 1080p monitor, so you'd need to scroll a lot for long texts. It's also weirdly off-center.
This entire idea is about size first and second, accessibility and look go dead last.
There is no advantage to using 58 bytes only. Just use 14KB if you care that much, which is the size the first 10 TCP packets that your server sends to the client before the first ACK anyway [1].
[1]: https://www.tunetheweb.com/blog/critical-resources-and-the-first-14kb/
dieulot · 2021-08-08
TLS also uses TCP, which enlarges the congestion window beforehand. This magical 12–14kB recommendation is obsolete nowadays with HTTPS and HTTP/2. See https://www.tunetheweb.com/blog/critical-resources-and-the-first-14kb/
3pm · 2022-08-25
I think 14KB 'rule' is less relevant these days, but is a good mnemonic to "put the most critical data at the start of the page". Even if this page has to be large, browsers are streaming it and can start processing before it is fully consumed.
https://www.tunetheweb.com/blog/critical-resources-and-the-first-14kb/
tunetheweb · 2019-04-21
As others have pointed out, this post is from 2015 and a lot has changed since then. I've added an updated section at the end, to clarify my thoughts since then (mostly unchanged to be honest, except for CSP): https://www.tunetheweb.com/blog/dangerous-web-security-features/#summa…