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Why is the Internet so Slow?

blog.apnic.net

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Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#121

Post by haldean »

Lagged2Death wrote: post #81

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…

This took me a total of 5 minutes: http://static.haldean.org/why-is-the-internet-slow.html

The page is 2.3kB on the wire, and the single other request it makes (for the image) adds another 70kB. Taken together, this is a two-order-of-magnitude decrease in page size, with exactly the same content.

Every byte is sacred! This webpage infuriates me.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#122

Post by NelsonMinar »

I appreciate the big picture they've presented. I think an important next step is to measure more precisely. Specifically to look at how QUIC and HTTP/2 impact real world performance. After reading the paper it's not clear they've looked at that at all.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#123

Post by rthomas6 »

thinkloop wrote: post #93
Lagged2Death wrote: post #81

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…

As much as ads are annoying, this has nothing to do with the article. One man's bloat is another man's content. No need for this nag to be top comment on HN for an article about why data isn't moving at the speed of light.

It's not ads! Jquery.com, bootstrapcdn.com, cloudfare.com, cloudfront.net, google-analytics.com, fontawesome.com, Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, Pocket, rating-widget.com, and typography.com are all used to put the content on this website, and none of them are ads.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#124

Post by bo1024 »

thinkloop wrote: post #93
Lagged2Death wrote: post #81

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…

As much as ads are annoying, this has nothing to do with the article. One man's bloat is another man's content. No need for this nag to be top comment on HN for an article about why data isn't moving at the speed of light.

I disagree. The article claims that latency is a problem because, as a main example, users dislike slow page load times (citing Google and Bing). So it a very fair response that we can have a much bigger impact of user-perceived latency by reducing the number of requests our pages make and the size of the page.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#125

Post by ouid »

rthomas6 wrote: post #123
thinkloop wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as ads are annoying, this has nothing to do with the article. One man's bloat is another man's content. No need for this nag to be top comment on HN for an article about why data isn't moving at the speed of light.

It's not ads! Jquery.com, bootstrapcdn.com, cloudfare.com, cloudfront.net, google-analytics.com, fontawesome.com, Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, Pocket, rating-widget.com, and typography.com are all used to put the content on this website, and none of them are ads.

but this comment was

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#126

Post by zepolen »

haldean wrote: post #121
Lagged2Death wrote: post #81

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…

This took me a total of 5 minutes: http://static.haldean.org/why-is-the-internet-slow.html The page is 2.3kB on the wire, and the single other request it makes (for the image) adds another 70kB. Taken together, this is a two-order-of-magnitude decrease in page size, with exactly the same content. Every byte is sacred! This webpage infuriates me.

Your 68kb png infuriates me when it can be compressed to 28kb.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#127

Post by Pxtl »

viraptor wrote: post #116
IshKebab wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually, I think ~10mbit is fast enough. You can easily use Hangouts/Skype with good quality video on that kind of link. The problems are elsewhere: it's not stable enough, and it's not responsive enough. Anything faster is just a cherry on top. Sure, files download faster, you can stream 4k, etc. But I'd say that's luxury which you could choose. Lower speeds are "enough" for a lot of people.

This. If I had perfect QOS where I knew foreground tasks would dominate my bandwidth and connection would never be interrupted and latency would be low and packet-loss would be negligible? I would be perfectly happy with 10mbit. I'm not downloading images that often.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#128

Post by haldean »

zepolen wrote: post #126
haldean wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This took me a total of 5 minutes: http://static.haldean.org/why-is-the-internet-slow.html The page is 2.3kB on the wire, and the single other request it makes (for the image) adds another 70kB. Taken together, this is a two-order-of-magnitude decrease in page size, with exactly the same content. Every byte is sacred! This webpage infuriates me.

Your 68kb png infuriates me when it can be compressed to 28kb.

While keeping it a PNG? I hit that thing with pngcrush and scaled it to half the size of the original article: what's your magic to get it down to 28k?

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#129

Post by rthomas6 »

ouid wrote: post #125
rthomas6 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not ads! Jquery.com, bootstrapcdn.com, cloudfare.com, cloudfront.net, google-analytics.com, fontawesome.com, Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, Pocket, rating-widget.com, and typography.com are all used to put the content on this website, and none of them are ads.

but this comment was

Buddy I hate all that shit. I use uMatrix and block as much as I can while still seeing the real content. In fact that's how I know what the domains are.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#130

Post by Spivak »

jdmichal wrote: post #114
zeta0134 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a large contributor to this trend is a side effect of JavaScript, which is to perform library inclusion at runtime inside the browser. Think about it. If you include a gigantic library in a compiled language, but only use 3 of its features, the rest of the library doesn't make it into your final program. Only those three features that you used do, because that's the linker's job. It takes only the features of…

That's standard dead code elimination, and that's only true in static linking. Dynamic linking, which is far more popular, will load the entire library into memory. And then you get interesting hybrids like Java, where libraries are dynamically linked but only the classes that are actually used are loaded. [0] The equivalent for dynamic languages is tree shaking, and is a harder or impossible problem depending on the…

Language theory question: In the case of JS is there a safe, but still useful, subset of the language where dead code elimination could be improved?

Ignore if it can be detected or not, we'll pretend that the author has to certify that they followed your subset and didn't do X, Y, or Z. If they disobeyed your rules then all bets are off and the result is undefined.

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