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Why is the Internet so Slow?

blog.apnic.net

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Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#31

Post by egeozcan »

3pt14159 wrote: post #7

If you want an easy speed up and you use a modern version of nginx, which you should for many reasons but chiefly performance and security. Add these lines to your nginx config file: # Only support HTTPS and enable http2 # which will allow you to multiplex requests. # In a separate config do a 301 from normal HTTP # for all paths / subdomains. listen 443 ssl http2 default_server; listen [::]:443 ssl http2 default_ser…

Is there similar things that can be done on a go-based server? Particularly Caddy...

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#32

Post by the8472 »

threepipeproblm wrote: post #18
lucozade wrote: post #8

Did I read this correctly? Is it saying that a general internet connection, without specialist low latency connectivity, is only 37x slower than its theoretical minimum? That's astonishingly good. It's great that they think they can do better but bloody hell. It's indistinguishable from magic.

You're saying that achieving 2.7% of the theoretical efficiency is good? Many car engines have an efficiency of around 20% for example, as compared to the maximum theoretical efficiency of 67%. If car engines performed only well enough to meet your standard of amazingness, your gas costs would be 7 or 8 times higher. Or if you used a modern Toyota engine for comparison, something like 14 times higher. Obviously I too…

Your car is not operating at 20% efficiency of theoretical limits if you take the whole energy pipeline into account. You know... fusion, sunlight, plankton, oil, refining, combustion, mechanical energy. On the other hand speed-of-light to actual ping times is an end-to-end efficiency calculation. Plankton in particular is terrible at converting energy.

sun -> mj-PV -> battery -> electric motors run circles around those.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#33

Post by greydius »

amadvance wrote: post #28
threepipeproblm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying that achieving 2.7% of the theoretical efficiency is good? Many car engines have an efficiency of around 20% for example, as compared to the maximum theoretical efficiency of 67%. If car engines performed only well enough to meet your standard of amazingness, your gas costs would be 7 or 8 times higher. Or if you used a modern Toyota engine for comparison, something like 14 times higher. Obviously I too…

You car is million times slower than the speed of light :)

10 million. Light: 300000 km/sec, car: 0.03 km/sec

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#34

Post by infinisil »

ETHZ is developing a new kind of internet architecture: https://scion-architecture.net/

It's deployed in some places and working already. Citing from the webpage:

> SCION is the first clean-slate Internet architecture designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communications.

Also it will reduce latency, increase throughput and more, as mentioned in the papers.

The project has really been getting traction in recent years, it may just become our new internet base layer.

Currently the people at ETHZ are working on verifying router hardware mathematically to guarantee SCION's properties.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#35

Post by IshKebab »

panic wrote: post #23

If you're thinking, "it's fast enough!" -- remember that a system's performance determines what you're able to build on top of it. If GPU designers had said "it's fast enough" ten years ago, for example, modern neural-net AI may never have happened. It's easy to imagine doing the same things faster, but it's harder to picture the new things that a lower-latency Internet would make possible.

I don't think anyone that has ever used Skype, VoIP, Facetime, etc has thought "this is fast enough".

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#38

Post by lucozade »

threepipeproblm wrote: post #18
lucozade wrote: post #8

Did I read this correctly? Is it saying that a general internet connection, without specialist low latency connectivity, is only 37x slower than its theoretical minimum? That's astonishingly good. It's great that they think they can do better but bloody hell. It's indistinguishable from magic.

You're saying that achieving 2.7% of the theoretical efficiency is good? Many car engines have an efficiency of around 20% for example, as compared to the maximum theoretical efficiency of 67%. If car engines performed only well enough to meet your standard of amazingness, your gas costs would be 7 or 8 times higher. Or if you used a modern Toyota engine for comparison, something like 14 times higher. Obviously I too…

Not to belittle the internal combustion engine but that's just the theoretical efficiency of chemical combustion. It's a local maximum. That's tiny compared to the global maximum energy available from the same amount of fuel.

As a trite comparison, it's a similar to arguing the theoretical maximum speed that a person can run. Interesting, but doesn't tell you anything about the maximum speed that a person can move.

The speed of light in a vacuum, though, is qualitatively different. It's not a local maximum, it's the global maximum.

Anyway, I reserve the right to be impressed. I spend enough of my life being jaded and cynical. Sometimes I see things like this and it makes me think about stuff that I take for granted.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#39

Post by the8472 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #25
zucchini_head wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not very experienced with these nginx settings. Could you explain how this improves speed so much for you? It seems that you've followed [1] by the similarity of what that suggests to what you've suggested. tcp_nodelay seems to force it to not wait 0.2 seconds, which nginx does so that it doesn't send lots of really small packets. I can see this increasing speed by 200ms (a lot) but increases network traffic as a…

So I'm more of a machine learning / cyber security guy than a sys admin, but with that proviso, here is my understanding: Of course you'll have to check your own site for your own performance issues, but while travelling from Toronto to Vilnius I found our site much slower and investigated why. We have a webapp running Ember with mix of largish assets, like images, and smallish assets, talking to a JSON API standard…

Nagle's algorithm is not a network level delay. If data is lost then it is retransmitted as soon as the sender learns about the loss. Nagle only delays application level sends.

The problem with webapps is a compounding effect of many requests.

a) dependency chains (asset A loads B loads C) mean the browser only knows to load C once B has been loaded, so the latencies (including nagle) add up. http/2 push is supposed to help with that.

b) statistics. your 95th percentile latency is irrelevant if you're loading hundreds of assets and want to know when the site has finished loading.

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