Field notes
The material that shouldn't be printed
Project Ariadne ends on its epilogue. It used to end on three appendices, and they came out — not because they were bad, but because all three had the same problem: they go stale, and a book cannot be corrected.
The performance appendix said so about itself, in its own text: “the numbers and tools in web performance move fast — I'll give you the principles plainly and the current specifics as snapshots, and trust you to refresh the snapshots when you read this.” An appendix that asks the reader to go and update it is an appendix asking to be a web page.
So here they are, in the form they wanted: reference rather than prose, deep-linkable, printable, and with a date on every one of them. What stayed in the book is the half that will still be true in 2040.
All three last reviewed 2026-09-04
If something here is out of date, it is a bug and I would like to know. These pages carry a date precisely so you can tell how much to trust them — which is more than the printed version could ever offer you.