Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The web sucks if you have a slow connection

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 622 posts

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#431

Post by markatkinson »

ikeboy wrote: post #74

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which cause…

As someone who lives in Africa, hoorah! More of this please. For me the best feeling is visiting a web page that is almost entirely text based. It loads in a few seconds which feels like quite a rare feeling these days.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#432

Post by hvidgaard »

Nas808 wrote: post #249
slededit wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You needed about a 100mhz CPU to playback mp3s without skipping. Seemed to hold both on my PPC mac and pentium windows machine.

I used a Pentium at 133 MHz at the time, and it struggled to play MP3. The tracks would stutter.

I used a Pentium 150MHz to play mp3s and do other stuff at the same time. It worked just fine. This was with Winamp in around 1997 I believe.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#433

Post by samuell »

fegul wrote: post #428
samuell wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried using Google products from Africa (Ethiopia ... last time this January), and generally, it is right out unusable. JS-heavy apps like GMail will never load properly at all. This while the connection in itself is not THAT bad. I use to use a 3G/4G mobile connection and it generally works excellent, with pretty quick load times, for everything else than javascript-heavy web apps. I have a hard time understand…

In Ethiopia's case, it's not so much the connection speed in Addis. There's a great deal of interference from the national Deep Packet Inspection filters that leads to timed-out requests, reset TCP connections, etc. JS-heavy apps make a lot of requests to background servers and should one of those requests fail, apps will hang. It's quite frustrating and I would often load pages with the console open to see which req…

That's good to know, Thanks!

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#434

Post by EGreg »

I have a different suggestion.

Build software that can work on a distributed architecgure. So people in Ethiopia can run their stuff on intranets and mesh networks and only occasionally send stuff around the world.

What broadband has really caused is this assumption that the computer is "always online". Apps often break when not online. When in reality there shouldn't even be "online/offline" but rather "server reachable/unreachable". And you should be building offline first apps, with sync across instances.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#435

Post by hvidgaard »

fenwick67 wrote: post #126

By far the worst site I regularly use, from a page loading perspective, is my local newspaper. It takes about 10 seconds before it loads to a usable state on a T1 connection. If I pop open an inspector, requests go on for about 30 seconds before they die down. It's about 8MB. http://www.telegraphherald.com/

If you wait 10 seconds to get the news you are more patient than me. I would quickly go elsewhere unless they deliver high quality news.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#436

Post by stephengillie »

acdha wrote: post #150
Jakob wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.

This is the main reason why Brave is my default browser: you can set the default to disable JavaScript and enable it only on sites which actually do something useful with it. My data usage dropped something like 1GB the first month I switched.

Chrome on Android has this exact same setting. I currently have 26 sites allowed to run Javascript.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#437

Post by samuell »

> The flaw in the “page weight doesn’t matter because average speed is fast” is that if you average the connection of someone in my apartment building (which is wired for 1Gbps internet) and someone on 56k dialup, you get an average speed of 500 Mbps. That doesn’t mean the person on dialup is actually going to be able to load a 5MB website.

As someone mentioned below too, the median value would make much more sense in this case (which it often does, it seems).

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#438

Post by AstralStorm »

samuell wrote: post #437

> The flaw in the “page weight doesn’t matter because average speed is fast” is that if you average the connection of someone in my apartment building (which is wired for 1Gbps internet) and someone on 56k dialup, you get an average speed of 500 Mbps. That doesn’t mean the person on dialup is actually going to be able to load a 5MB website. As someone mentioned below too, the median value would make much more sense i…

Median also does not make sense. Dialup is not as common as other connections anymore. You would get pretty high ADSL Mbps as the median.

Generally the distribution of bandwidth is multimodal, similarly of latency.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#439

Post by thirdsun »

acdha wrote: post #143
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.

This was the baseline experience everywhere in the 90s: people would just do something else while they waited for things to download over dialup. Clients for things like email, Usenet, browsers, etc. commonly had batch modes where you could queue large downloads so you could basically see what's new, select a bunch of large things, and then let it download while you got a cup of coffee / dinner / slept.

Oh yes, I remember my teenager days of happily waking up in the morning knowing that our ISDN connection surely has finished the download of that album or live recording I started last night via Soulseek / DC++ / Audiogalaxy.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#440

Post by AstralStorm »

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.

YouTube still has 240p mode for that very reason, they just do not advertise it in the UI.

The modern codecs make these super compressed video and sound relatively watchable.

Post reply on HN