The Long-Tail of Performance
summary
Examples and analyses show the long tail drives real user harm: median site weight is median 1.5 MB while the 90th percentile 5.7 MB users suffer far worse; profiling with 3x/6x CPU throttle and Chrome DevTools isolates CPU-bound layout costs; MDN removes web fonts, substitutes system fonts, and subsets assets to cut fonts 370KB → 66KB, yielding ~12% lower layout cost and ~1s faster interactive time for low-end devices, proving disciplined fallbacks, Save-Data handling and service worker caching measurably improve real-world resilience.
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