Premises — property operations platform
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Why Premises3 min read

Fast on a 2019 phone: performance as a feature

A cleaner in a basement with one bar of signal does not care about your architecture. She cares whether the page opens before she gives up.

By the end of this pageYou will know how heavy a page is, why that number is deliberate, and roughly what it means on the phones your staff actually have.
On this pageWhat a page weighsWhy it matters more hereWhat we do to keep it that way
How long a page takes on your connectionCalculator
s
seconds for a typical Premises page (58 KB, 3 requests)
seconds for a typical property-software dashboard (2.4 MB, 40 requests)
Defaults are a poor 3G signal. Sizes are measured; timings are a simple model, not a benchmark.

What a page weighs

A typical staff page is under 60 kilobytes including the stylesheet and the script, and makes three requests. There is no framework downloaded on every visit, no tracking script, no font file bigger than the page it decorates. Images appear only where they are the content — a receipt, a tenant's ID — never as decoration.

Why it matters more here

Office software is used in offices with fibre. Building software is used in stairwells, basements, guard posts and parking levels, on phones that were not new when they were bought. The tenant portal is used wherever the tenant is, which includes a bus. A page that needs two megabytes and a modern processor is a page that does not open, and a page that does not open is a cleaner who stops using the checklist.

What we do to keep it that way

  • Every release is checked against a size budget; a page that grows past it fails the build.
  • The cleaner's and guard's pages are tested on a real 2019 mid-range Android over throttled 3G before they ship.
  • Nothing loads that the page does not use. The figure runtime on this help page is five kilobytes and is not loaded in the app at all.
The honest limit. A page full of photographs — a ticket with six pictures of a leak — weighs what the photographs weigh. Those pages load the text first and the images after, so the page is usable before it is complete.

Related

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Describes the platform as it is today. Something out of date? Tell us. · help 0.12.3