Imagine 2019 Panel Recap: Frontend Performance Q&A

May 16, 2019 - Reading time: 2 minutes

I am at #MagentoImagine 2019 this year at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas. Great food and fun times networking. What follows is a recap of some of the hottest panel topics in Magento development. This post is on Frontend Performance QA.

These details are gleaned from notes I took while taking in the panels, so keep that in mind if anything seems overly obvious.

This was an open QA, so I am going to format details I gleaned a bit different from previous posts.

Andrew Levine (Frontend Lead) does not recommend built in bundling mechanism.

This realization was met with both positive and negative responses. It is clear a lot of developers like using bundling, but the issue is how RequireJS utilizes it. Instead of going into it directly, Andrew offered to talk with anyone offline at Imagine about how to handle RequireJS code bundling. Per official documentation, "If you don’t enable bundling, Magento only merges RequireJS and its configuration. When you enable both bundling and merging, Magento creates a single JavaScript file..." It certainly sounds like YMMV (your Mileage May Vary) with this.

Andrew Levine wants to implement a performance culture with rankings (has ideas TBD). Maybe ranking websites.

This was actually brought up by an attendee and Andrew seemed reluctant at first to answer since the talk was recorded and he didn't want to show favoritism (and give free advertising) to agencies and firms. However, after a few statements, he seemed to warm to the possibility. In my opinion, this could be a good thing for the community as it gives developers something to strive toward. Bonus points if we can get details on implementations!

Magento is officially using Lighthouse and Web Page Test for Benchmarking

The newest version of Google Lighthouse is a given for developers - it isn't hyperbole in saying that the profiling capability of this tool is so vast that not using it means missing out on key performance metrics not seen via the standard Chrome console. Web Page Test is old and antiquated, but Andrew states that it gives HTTP2 info not readily available or accurate with other tools.

Andrew is developing a RequireJS Analyzer (not public yet, but watch for it)

This works using a nodeJS tool called puppeteer. He was pretty tight lipped about the capabilities, but the analysis panel feedback looks very useful. Look for that soon via his GitHub most likely.