I would highly recommend not only testing on slow network connections, but also on slow computers, tablets and smartphones. At least in my case there was some low hanging fruit that immediately improved the experience on these slow devices which I would have never noticed had I not tested on slower machines.
Engineering for Slow Internet
61–70 of 406 posts
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#62Having a lot of experience commuting on underground public transport (intermittent, congested), and living/working in Australia (remote), I can safely say that most services are terrible for people without "ideal" network conditions. On the London Underground it's particularly noticeable that most apps are terrible at handling network that comes and goes every ~2 minutes (between stops), and which takes ~15s to conne…
It's not only the services them self. I have a very slow mobile connection, and one thing that bothered me immensly is downloading images in the browser:
How is it, than when I go to a .jpg url to view an image in the browser it takes way longer and sometimes times out, than hopping over to termux and running wget.
I had this problem with both firefox and chrome based browsers.
Note that even the wget download usually takes 10-30 seconds on my mobile connection.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#63What are the hopes for "engineering for slow internet" to happen, when people have engineered applications for "fast internet" when all we had was "slow internet". Nice thought in theory but unnecessarily gives false hope. Confluence/Jira sometimes need to download 20 megabytes in order to show a page with only text and some icons. I have a friend that tells me that in their company they had two jiras , one for devel…
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Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#64IMO author shouldn't have censored the app names. The world deserves to know.
Those I recognize (from interface, branding, strings, etc.): * Slack -- https://brr.fyi/media/engineering-for-slow-internet/load-err... * Signal (main screen) -- https://brr.fyi/media/engineering-for-slow-internet/in-app-d... * 1Password (config/about page) -- https://brr.fyi/media/engineering-for-slow-internet/in-app-d... * Zoom (updater screen on Mac) -- https://brr.fyi/media/engineering-for-slow-internet/in-app-d.…
Yes - name and shame. Slack is INFURIATING on intermittent connectivity. That is simply not good enough for a product who's primary value is communication.
Anyone who has tried to use Slack:
- in the countryside with patchy connection - abroad - in China - on the London Underground
Can attest to how poor and buggy Slack is on bad internet.
These aren't weird edgecases - London is a major tech hub. Remote workers and open source communities rely on Slack around the world.
China is the second largest economy in the world with a population of 1.7B (incidentally it's blocked at least it was when I was last there but even on VPN it was weird and buggy).
How aren't these kinds of metrics tracked by their product teams. How isn't WhatsApp the gold standard now for message delivery, replicated everywhere.
Neither email nor WhatsApp have the weird consistency issues Slack has with simply sending a message with dodgy internet. Not to mention the unreliable and sometimes user-hostile client state management when Slack can't phone home which can sometimes lead to lost work or inability to see old messages you literally were able to see until you tried to interact with stuff.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#65As a web developer I actually resisted much faster internet for ages. Until 2022 I had a rock-solid, never-failed 7 megabit/s-ish down, 640k up connection and I found it very easy to build sites that others describe as blazing fast. This was slow really by the standards of much of the UK population even by 2015. So all I had to do was make it fast for me. A change of provider for practical reasons gave me an ADSL2+ c…
As a web developer you can just throttle your connection in developer tools though, no self-limiting required. But nobody does that in big corporations building most of the sites needed by people with slow connections.
In my experience, browsers limit speeds in a way that's kind of nice and stable. You tell them to stick to 100kbps and they'll have 100kbps. Packet loss, jitter, it's all a single number, and rather stable. It's like a 250kbps fiber optic connection that just happens to be very long.
In my experience, real life slow internet isn't like that. Packet loss numbers jump around, jitter switches second by second, speeds vary wildly and packets arrive out of order more than in order. Plus, with sattelites, the local router sends fake TCP acknowledgements to hide the slow data transfer, so the browser thinks it's connected while the traffic is still half a second away.
There are software tools to limit connectivity in a more realistic way, often using VMs, but they're not used as often as the nice browser speed limiter.
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#66[flagged]
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#67A lot of this resonates. I'm not in Antartica, I'm in Beijing, but still struggle with the internet. Being behind the great firewall means using creative approaches. VPNs only sometimes work, and each leaves a signature that the firewall's hueristics and ML can eventually catch onto. Even state-mandated ones are 'gently' limited at times of political sensitivity. It all ends up meaning that, even if I get a connectio…
I hear you on frontend-only react. But hopefully the newer React Server Components are helping? They just send HTML over the wire (right?)
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#68Having a lot of experience commuting on underground public transport (intermittent, congested), and living/working in Australia (remote), I can safely say that most services are terrible for people without "ideal" network conditions. On the London Underground it's particularly noticeable that most apps are terrible at handling network that comes and goes every ~2 minutes (between stops), and which takes ~15s to conne…
WhatsApp has a massive audience in developing countries where it's normal for people to have slower internet and much slower devices. That perspective being so embedded in their development goals certainly has given WhatsApp good reason to be the leading messaging platform in many countries around the world
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#69[dead]
Re: Engineering for Slow Internet
#70I still think engineering for slow internet is really important, and massively under appreciated by most software developers, but ... LEO systems (like Starlink, especially StarLink) essentially solve the core problems now. I did an Arctic transit (Alaska to Norway) in September and October of 2023, and we could make FaceTime video calls from the ship, way above the Arctic Circle, despite cloud cover, being quite far…
Idealistic! I think a lot of countries are going to block starlink in the future by interfering with the signals, much like the success some countries are having interfering so heavily with GPS. Their governments won't want uncensored web, or an American company being the gateway to the internet. They'll maintain whatever territorial networks they have now and the speed question is still relevant.
Also the number of people worldwide whose only access to the internet is a $100 android phone with older software and limited CPU should be considered