Latencies introduced by Advertising, are substantial IMO as well.
The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
economist.com
The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
#2Pretty inaccurate article I'd say. The general premise of "broadband is faster, but there's more to download" is close to right, and I'll agree that 8 seconds was about how long it took to load web pages back when, but it's a very rare page (other than HN itself, ironically) that takes more than about 3 seconds to load on even middling DSL.
And I have no idea why streaming video requires 60ms latency.
Re: The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
#3"The future is beckoning. Netflix has just announced an on-demand video-streaming service offering full high-definition picture quality (so-called 1080p, which has 1,080 lines in its picture) with 5.1-channel surround sound. Each stream being watched will require a megabyte a second of bandwidth and a latency of less than 60ms if it is to deliver crisp, pin-sharp video and pristine sound."
Latency doesn't matter with video, afaik. This seems inaccurate.
Re: The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
#4Pretty inaccurate article I'd say. The general premise of "broadband is faster, but there's more to download" is close to right, and I'll agree that 8 seconds was about how long it took to load web pages back when, but it's a very rare page (other than HN itself, ironically) that takes more than about 3 seconds to load on even middling DSL. And I have no idea why streaming video requires 60ms latency.
On my middling DSL (320 kbps symmetric) there's a lot of pages that take more than 3 seconds to load, especially if you're not using AdBlock. There are some Flash ads that take 5+ seconds to load just by themselves!
The typical for a large corporate site seems to be 4-6 sec for me. I just timed cnn.com and yahoo.com both at 5s total load time, and aol.com at 8s (all in Chrome on Linux).
edit: Found a new winner: foxnews.com consistently takes between 25 and 33 seconds to load.
Re: The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
#5People like this shouldn't be writing technical articles.
A 700ms ping would be indicative of severe network problems, especially at that distance. The author is probably experiencing packet loss. Realistic ping times across the country are usually 100ms or so. I can ping most major websites in under 20ms.
DNS can indeed be a bottleneck, but it usually isn't. It's a fairly basic service, and if it's really a problem it's simple stupid to switch to a free provider like google.
Streaming video is not dependent on latency, only throughput.
Dark fiber won't necessarily help. The bottleneck is more realistically in the switching equipment. A single fiber can carry massive amounts of data.
Re: The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
#6I don't want faster as in more throughput, I want faster as in lower latency.
Imagine if we could actually develop software that could depend on the internet being lower the 1/60th of a second. All the logic we have to do in games hide latency would go away. We would then be able to just pass back and forth input streams and have our simulations sync by exchanging them back and forth. Perhaps 1/120th would be ideal so that both parties feel a sub 1/60th of a second response time.
Re: The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
#7"The future is beckoning. Netflix has just announced an on-demand video-streaming service offering full high-definition picture quality (so-called 1080p, which has 1,080 lines in its picture) with 5.1-channel surround sound. Each stream being watched will require a megabyte a second of bandwidth and a latency of less than 60ms if it is to deliver crisp, pin-sharp video and pristine sound." Latency doesn't matter with…
Also, Netflix clarified that they aren't doing 1080p this year: http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/netflix-1080p/
Re: The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
#8Funny how the article is talking about slow page loads and the page itself has a little advertising popup.
Re: The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
#9Pretty inaccurate article I'd say. The general premise of "broadband is faster, but there's more to download" is close to right, and I'll agree that 8 seconds was about how long it took to load web pages back when, but it's a very rare page (other than HN itself, ironically) that takes more than about 3 seconds to load on even middling DSL. And I have no idea why streaming video requires 60ms latency.
On my middling DSL (320 kbps symmetric) there's a lot of pages that take more than 3 seconds to load, especially if you're not using AdBlock. There are some Flash ads that take 5+ seconds to load just by themselves! The typical for a large corporate site seems to be 4-6 sec for me. I just timed cnn.com and yahoo.com both at 5s total load time, and aol.com at 8s (all in Chrome on Linux). edit: Found a new winner: foxn…
foxnews just took me 8 seconds to load. All the JS took 1.42 seconds and flash took about a second as well; 3MB for everything. I have a fairly fast cable connection.
Tested in chrome 5.0 dev
Re: The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
#10Pretty inaccurate article I'd say. The general premise of "broadband is faster, but there's more to download" is close to right, and I'll agree that 8 seconds was about how long it took to load web pages back when, but it's a very rare page (other than HN itself, ironically) that takes more than about 3 seconds to load on even middling DSL. And I have no idea why streaming video requires 60ms latency.
On my middling DSL (320 kbps symmetric) there's a lot of pages that take more than 3 seconds to load, especially if you're not using AdBlock. There are some Flash ads that take 5+ seconds to load just by themselves! The typical for a large corporate site seems to be 4-6 sec for me. I just timed cnn.com and yahoo.com both at 5s total load time, and aol.com at 8s (all in Chrome on Linux). edit: Found a new winner: foxn…
obviously its not a uniform experience, and there are problems with the article, but i do think it stands to reason that rich content, and in my mind especially Advertising, grind the experience which I recall was faster in many cases.