A page that lays out twice is a page that lays out forever

write-upsystems · 20 points · 18 comments

Short one. If you animate a height, the browser lays the page out on every frame of that animation. On the machine you wrote it on that is a stutter. On the machine you did not, it is a slideshow.

There is no transform that stands in for a height, which is the honest problem. What there is instead is: do not animate it. The state change a reader asked for does not need explaining to them over three hundred milliseconds.

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18 comments

2026-10-14
Yes, but it costs a second index and I would not do it under a million rows.
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2026-10-14
I disagree with the framing but not the conclusion, which is an odd place to end up.
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2026-10-14
Small correction: it is the fifth most recent, not the fifth oldest. Took me a minute.
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2026-10-14
Fixed, thank you. That was a real error and not a typo.
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2026-10-14
This is the one I was looking for last week. Thank you.
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2026-10-14
Worth adding that this only holds if the clock is monotonic. Ours was not, and the failure looked exactly like a slow disk.
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2026-10-14
I have hit this and solved it the other way, and I now think your way is better.
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2026-10-14
Do you have a link for the second claim? I want to read the original.
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2026-10-14
Two years ago I would have argued. Having since maintained one of these, I would not.
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2026-10-14
The part people skip is the last paragraph, which is the whole argument.
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2026-10-14
Counterexample: on a read-heavy workload we measured the opposite. Happy to write it up if useful.
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2026-10-14
Reading this made me go and check ours, and ours was wrong. So: thank you, and also, ugh.
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2026-10-14
What did you use to measure it?
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2026-10-14
A trace, not a profiler. The profiler said the function was fast, which it was.
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2026-10-14
This matches what the errata says, which almost nobody reads.
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2026-10-14
Filed under things I will rediscover in eighteen months and be annoyed about.
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2026-10-14
The naming point generalises. Half our bugs are a name answering a different question than its value.
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2026-10-14
Is there a version of this that works when the window is not fixed?
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