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Why is the Internet so Slow?

blog.apnic.net

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Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#81

Post by Lagged2Death »

If the 3x slowdown from the infrastructure were eliminated, each round-trip-time being 3x faster would affect all the protocols above, and we could immediately cut the latency inflation from ~37x to around 10x, without any protocol modifications.

The page this article is published on makes 87 separate network requests to 19 different domains. Even with a great deal of the content cached, it takes 7 seconds to reload over my WiFi today. This is because I'm using an ad blocker; without one, the page makes more requests to more domains and transfers more stuff, slower.

It seems likely that cutting bloat would have a much bigger impact on responsiveness than infrastructure upgrades. Cutting bloat would produce benefits even (especially) in times and places where signals or infrastructure are marginal. Cutting bloat could mean your old phone or tablet computer could browse the web tolerably instead of ending up in a landfill. Cutting bloat from a website today produces a benefit, for all visitors, worldwide, today. Improving infrastructure may be a good investment, but cutting bloat is a force multiplier.

The responsiveness of the web has been adjusted to optimize the number of eyeballs that see ads. If a site is too sluggish, people leave, but a site that's too fast is leaving money on the table. How many advertising, tracking, and affiliate domains would a web page like this connect to, if latency were cut by two thirds?

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#82

Post by Yellow_Boat »

"Slow" internet is not so bad (especially when it is not really THAT slow). Limitations in connectivity force designers and developers (therefore large companies) to optimise things and save resources. Internet speed growth rate could be 5% (compounding) would be enough in order to provide a friendly environment for new frameworks, technologies in the field of network and web to benefit all.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#83

Post by grovegames »

exabrial wrote: post #73

Because every time we get faster connections, we download more the client and force more client side processing. Angular and friends are just causing a worse user experience, not a better one. We also don't take advantage of DNS enough. We should/could use it to pass along information about the client's ISP to locate a server one or two hops away from the client. DNS could easily solve the IPV4 with SRV records, but…

How is angular making the web slower. An angular project can sit somewhere in the 130kb range, with lighter frameworks like vue sitting at 30kb. These are smaller than most images or gifs used on the web. So the trade-off is one image on your page, or a robust RIA experience, with much more maintainable code. If you build it correctly, you're decreasing the amount of bytes on the wire significantly when using client side frameworks, over re-rendering each and every page on the server for every interaction. I also maintain a large vanilla javascript application that was written before I arrived, and the javascript weighs in at almost 5MB, and we have a general no touch policy on it because of how fragile the vanilla javascript is. It was poorly written, but even a poorly written vue app, would come in at much less than the 5mb JS. I just don't buy this as the reason the web is slow.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#84

Post by maccard »

arethuza wrote: post #11
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.

Indeed - I've been using the Internet since the early 1990s and I'm constantly amazed that I can be playing a multi-user game (e.g. WoT) with tens of people in multiple countries and get sub 50ms ping times.

What's even more impressive is how games like WOT hands multiple users with different latencies, and how they attempt to hide that from you! Reminds you that the ping number you see on screen is (almost) meaningless when you start to dig into it

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#87

Post by c3833174 »

panic wrote: post #68
dom0 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the downvotes; the slowness of most slow web pages is clearly caused by shitty JS.

The internet and the web aren't the same! They're measuring the time it takes to fetch an HTML resource, which doesn't involve JavaScript.

The article is about latency, and websites relying dozens of sequential requests caused by scripts are certainly the most affected by latency.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#88

Post by exabrial »

grovegames wrote: post #83
exabrial wrote: post #73

Because every time we get faster connections, we download more the client and force more client side processing. Angular and friends are just causing a worse user experience, not a better one. We also don't take advantage of DNS enough. We should/could use it to pass along information about the client's ISP to locate a server one or two hops away from the client. DNS could easily solve the IPV4 with SRV records, but…

How is angular making the web slower. An angular project can sit somewhere in the 130kb range, with lighter frameworks like vue sitting at 30kb. These are smaller than most images or gifs used on the web. So the trade-off is one image on your page, or a robust RIA experience, with much more maintainable code. If you build it correctly, you're decreasing the amount of bytes on the wire significantly when using client…

This comment makes my head hurt

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#89

Post by icebraining »

wyager wrote: post #75
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…

> which you should for many reasons but chiefly performance and security. Why would you use nginx for security? I see over 100 CVEs for nginx. This isn't exactly unexpected. Nginx is an incredibly complicated piece of software written for performance in C. That's basically the trifecta of security badness. If you want security, why not use a (possibly slower) simpler product written in a safer language?

Ah, the old concept of binary security - either you want it or not. It doesn't work like that, security is one need to be balanced against others.

Also, lots of CVEs indicate only one thing: that lots of people are checking it.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#90

Post by giobox »

infinisil wrote: post #78
jerardope wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting approach. I've read about SCION before. I believe, however, that its goal is primarily security. The reduced latency claim simply comes from the fact that they try to restrict routing in such a way that, for example, traffic with source and destination both in the US will never leave the US because of some weird routing policies. I'm not sure about this. Somehow, it seems to be against the principles…

Yeah, speed isn't the primary focus, more of a byproduct I don't understand what this has to do with a free internet, routing doesn't have any affect on that

I think the poster means "free" as in data travelling freely regardless of State/national borders, as the internet largely does today.
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