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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

danluu.com

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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#161

Post by phil21 »

falcolas wrote: post #75
andyana wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentions packet loss of 10%. That's a different problem than a slow connection.

High packet loss and slow connections frequently go hand in hand (TCP over cellular modems). This effect is exacerbated if the web site you're connecting to changes congestion control and TCP ramp up settings.

10% packet loss though typically is the threshold of "completely unusable" TCP connections. Depends of course, but 5% I generally think of "severely degraded" (e.g. ssh being almost unusable but still able to get some basic stuff done during a sev0) and 10% being "drive on-location because you aren't getting anything done" territory.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#162

Post by throwawayish »

derefr wrote: post #149
antisthenes wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video. Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing. You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.

> it'll take them OVER THREE HOURS I remember frequently spending three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s. Mostly software, not videos+, but it really just felt like a regular thing back then. + Computers nearly didn't have the power to decode video—or even audio—in realtime back then, unless it was the entirely uncompressed kind. I recall ripping a CD to WAV and finding out half-way that my 2G…

A Pentium II can play a DVD back at 24 fps back no problems.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#163

Post by [deleted] »

timdavila wrote: post #138
kuschku wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works? Single Page Applications with dozens of MB of Javascript, Google AMP (which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G), and so on.

> which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G source? the entire goal of AMP is to load pages quickly

[deleted]

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#164

Post by SquareWheel »

timdavila wrote: post #138
kuschku wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works? Single Page Applications with dozens of MB of Javascript, Google AMP (which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G), and so on.

> which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G source? the entire goal of AMP is to load pages quickly

Well, it would have to be downloaded once. It'd stay cached after that though so it's not really a concern. They use version numbers for cache busting.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#165

Post by atbentley »

Symbiote wrote: post #48
atbentley wrote: post #34

> if we just look at the three top 35 sites tested in this post, two send uncompressed javascript over the wire, two redirect the bare domain to the www subdomain, and two send a lot of extraneous information by not compressing images So uncompressed javascript and images are bad, but I thought apex domain to www subdomain redirection was an optimisation as the apex domain can often only point to a single server but…

The apex domain can only use A records, i.e. point directly to an IP address. It can have multiple A records, ebay.com does so: host ebay.com ebay.com has address 66.135.216.190 ebay.com has address 66.211.162.12 ebay.com has address 66.211.181.123 ebay.com has address 66.211.185.25 ebay.com has address 66.211.160.86 ebay.com has address 66.135.209.52 Without a CNAME (alias) record, eBay need to control the DNS resol…

Ah, I was unaware that there could be multiple IPs on an A record, thanks for that. If I'm understanding this right though, the extra IPs would just be for redundancy and resilience and cannot be relied for geographic routing? In this case ebay.com redirects to www.ebay.com.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#166

Post by hyperpape »

iLoch wrote: post #100
hyperpape wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always a tradeoff. Several sites stopped serving CSS during the Superbowl ( https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/828415747625992192 ). At a smaller scale, the same thing happens to some sites that reach the HN front-page.

So a couple sites go down on a single day of the year because they were unprepared and suddenly it's a bad idea to depend on CSS? Seems like costly optimization with almost no benefit to me.

It depends on exactly the costs are. But in that example, those sites are spending millions on Superbowl ads, and it's probably their highest day of traffic, so it's not "almost no benefit".

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#167

Post by derefr »

joeyh wrote: post #68
diggan wrote: post #39

Something that sticks out looking at the table. How can some sites simply FAIL loading? I mean, there is something inherently wrong with our web today, where if my internet is very slow and _could_ load a page in 80 seconds if I just leave it like that, the server itself could have configured the timeout to be 60 seconds. So I can never load the page?! The assumption is here that both points of the connection is base…

I chatted about just this timeout issue with an engineer from a major CDN while he was at my house enjoying the dialup. Seems like simply a matter of resource management; slow connections do use more resources. Most CDN customers don't care or don't know that a few percent of the US population is getting their web browsing broken by timeouts, so there's no push back. (NASA has their wacky ways around the issue for IS…

That's pretty smart of NASA; things like a caching HTTP proxy still wouldn't work in some cases, given that sites can expect your browser to make a given AJAX request within X ms of requesting the page.

I wonder if there's still a more "API level" way to handle things, though, rather than making your computer into a dumb frame buffer client with extremely low responsiveness to typing/scrolling.

Maybe they could run a headless browser on Earth, and use a protocol like the Chromecast does to synchronize its DOM state to a "browser proxy" in space—like a higher-level, domain-specific version of the X11 protocol. That'd still have latency for JavaScript-based webapp UI, though... maybe the JS could be split and its state synchronized so that the "server" handles timer triggers, while the "client" handles input events.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#168

Post by TeMPOraL »

ggreer wrote: post #147
dba7dba wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny anecdote about the freeway system of southern California. When they were initially planning the system in 1930s, 40s, they were planning to have the system in use for next 100 years. So they built over sized roads (like 10 lane freeway, without having to stop for traffic lights, that go THROUGH center of a major city). When the system proved so car friendly, more and more people moved in and bought cars. Within…

Isn't that a good unintended consequence? They built out infrastructure which attracted lots of people & jobs. Today, SoCal is home to world-leading firms in entertainment & aerospace. They also have top-tier research and educational institutions.

Which is why, when discussing infrastructure upgrades in our Hackerspace, I keep reminding that infrastructure is an enabler - it should not be built to support current needs, it needs a healthy margin to enable people to do more. People always find interesting ways to use up extra capacity.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#169

Post by barkingcat »

antisthenes wrote: post #124
swanson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

One wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video. Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing. You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.

3 hours is so low in the grand scheme of things. It used to take 3 hours to download a jpg over dialup ...

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#170

Post by rmc »

freehunter wrote: post #41
Someone1234 wrote: post #21

I found out this the hard way. T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem. While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exce…

Yeah when I used to run over my T-Mobile data allotment (in the US) and they dropped me to whatever speed they throttle you to when your "high speed" data is gone, Google Maps wouldn't load, Facebook wouldn't load, YouTube wouldn't load. I remember using all of those things back in the days when a 3G connection was a luxury, back when Windows was the best smartphone platform. What happened between then and now that s…

> What happened between then and now that suddenly nothing works?

The average expection changed. Back in the day, everyone was on $SLOW_SPEED, so pages were designed for it. Now-a-days they can, and do design, pages for higher speeds

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