How CSS works: Parsing and painting CSS in the critical rendering path

Insightful post by the folks over at LogRocket on the rendering pipeline: If your site takes forever to load, chances are your users aren’t gonna wait for it to finish, even if there’s valuable content to be found there. Some studies have shown that up to 50% of users leave a page after 3 seconds …

Tips for improving performance of React Native apps

While researching a performance issue in a React Native app by doing a deep dive into the bridge, I stumbled upon this nice list of tips by jamsch. The list – which touches react-navigation, the types of lists one can use, etc. – was originally posted as a comment on a Github Issue, but deserves …

V8 internals for JavaScript developers: Arrays

This presentation demonstrates how learning just a little bit about JavaScript engine internals can help you improve the run-time performance of your JavaScript code — not just in V8 specifically, but across all JavaScript engines! A written version is also available.

React Native Under the Hood: MessageQueue & JS Thread

Yesterday I spent all day on the React Native Bridge digging deep into what gets sent over. This talk by Rotem Mizrachi-Meidan nicely details why one would want to do that. Next to the basic MessageQueue.spy(), I also used the aforementioned rn-snoopy to get some aggregated stats. A write-up of this video is also available.

FastImage, performant React Native image component

React Native’s Image component handles image caching like browsers for the most part. If the server is returning proper cache control headers for images you’ll generally get the sort of built in caching behavior you’d have in a browser. Even so many people have noticed: Flickering. Cache misses. Low performance loading from cache. Low performance …

A Tinder Progressive Web App Performance Case Study

Addy Osmani: Tinder recently swiped right on the web. Their new responsive Progressive Web App — Tinder Online — is available to 100% of users on desktop and mobile, employing techniques for JavaScript performance optimization, Service Workers for network resilience and Push Notifications for chat engagement. Today we’ll walk through some of their web perf learnings. Their PWA is …

Implement FLIP transitions easily with flipping

Back in 2015 Paul Lewis published a brilliant article named FLIP your animations, a technique to getting smooth animations on the web. FLIP stands for First, Last, Invert, Play First: before anything happens, record the current (i.e., first) position and dimensions of the element that will transition. You can use element.getBoundingClientRect() for this, as will …

XCode 9.0: Fixing a Slow/Unresponsive iOS Simulator

Whilst initially implementing react-native-maps into a project I noticed that the iOS Simulator didn’t quite like it. Whenever the Mapview was visible on the screen, the Simulator was maxing out on something. Turns out the OpenGLES.framework that comes with XCode 9.0 – and not react-native-maps itself – is the culprit. That version is buggy and …

Optimize React Performance

Good advice every React dev should be aware of: React is known to be blazingly fast with its Virtual DOM implementation. However, even with React’s built-in performance, there are instances when the UI can begin to feel sluggish. The primary culprit for poor performance is generating too many renders and reconciliations. We’ll cover 4 techniques …