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Why is the Internet so Slow?

blog.apnic.net

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Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#131

Post by bobbington »

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 would say that the title "it's slow" is ridiculous because 1/30th of the fastest possible speed in the universe is insanely fast. Better to say "it's fast, but I think we can make it 3 times faster".

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#132

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#133

Post by slf »

haldean wrote: post #128
zepolen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can use lossy PNG compression (palletizing) since it's 'just' a graph. There are seven different colors in it that all alias to white.

Convert it to a 32 color 8-bit version and it looks identical. Then use ImageOptim (or like) to compress it down to less than 16 KiB.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#135

Post by ouid »

rthomas6 wrote: post #129
ouid wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was joking. I think it wasn't a terribly good joke though, so sorry.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#136

Post by charrondev »

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.

I'll just leave these here.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#137

Post by pagnol »

charrondev wrote: post #136
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.

I'll just leave these here. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

Thanks for the links, but why do people downvote your comment?

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#138

Post by closeparen »

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.

Videoconferencing is actually pretty awful on a high bandwidth link if the latency and jitter are high.

I can have an effective voice conversation with terrible quality audio if it's low latency. Extremely lifelike (high bitrate) audio is just uncanny (not helpful) if the latency and jitter are high.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#139

Post by vbernat »

baybal2 wrote: post #77
vidarh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean microseconds here? ms is milliseconds, and that just does not make any sense. E.g. I'm 7 (visible) hops away from the nearest Google DNS, and roundtrip pings to 8.8.8.8 are between 7ms and 8ms.

Yes, milliseconds. The difference there is because routers above you most likely are a carrier grade equipment like Cisco gear with ASIC based switching. This is what you can expect from big ISP in a big city, and less likely in networks serving more remote suburbs.

An EX2200, a routing switch you can pay for about 500$, is also ASIC-based. Linux on a server has no problem routing with a latency in the order of 100ns. I don't see what kind of equipments would route in the order of 10ms. That's just too huge.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#140

Post by tutanchamun »

majewsky wrote: post #72
tutanchamun wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, is there a reason for sites not 301 redirecting non-www to www urls or vice-versa? Wouldn't that help to avoid problems like these? They also don't implement any security headers: https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze.html?host=scion-arch...

That wouldn't help. If you go to https://foo , before the server can even redirect you to https://www.foo , it has to present a valid cert for foo without www.

Thanks for the answer. :)
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