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Engineering for Slow Internet

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Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#101

Post by nicbou »

I travel a lot. Slow internet is pretty common. Also, right now my mobile data ran out and I'm capped at 8 kbps.

Websites that are Just Text On A Page should load fast, but many don't. Hacker News is blazing fast, but Google's API docs never load.

The worst problem is that most UIs fail to account for slow requests. Buttons feel broken. Things that really shouldn't need megabytes of data to load still take minutes to load or just fail. Google Maps' entire UI is broken.

I wish that developers spent more time designing and testing for slow internet. Instead we get data hungry websites that only work great on fast company laptops with fast internet.

---

On a related note, I run a website for a living, and moving to a static site generators was one of the best productivity moves I've made.

Instead of the latency of a CMS permeating everything I do, I edit text files at blazing speed, even when fully offline. I just push changes once I'm back online. It's a game changer.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#102

Post by lawgimenez »

From where I'm from (Southeast Asia), slow internet is common in provincial and remote areas. It's like the OP's experience in South Pole but slower.

That's why I always cringe at these fancy-looking UI cross-platform apps since I know they will never work in a remote environment. Also, that is why offline support is very important. I only use Apple Notes and Things 3, both work tremendously in such remote settings.

Imagine your notes or to-do list (ehem Basecamp) not loading since it needs internet connection

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#103

Post by iforgotpassword »

padolsey wrote: post #43

A 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…

Tried multiple VPNs in China and finally rolled my own obfuscation layer for Wireshark. A quick search revealed there are multiple similar projects on GitHub, but I guess the problem is once they get some visibility, they don't work that well anymore. I'm still getting between 1 and 10mbit/s (mostly depending on time of day) and pretty much no connectivity issues.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#104

Post by nicbou »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #68
danpalmer wrote: post #9

Having 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

It works remarkably well when your phone runs out of data and you get capped at 8 kbps. Even voice calls work smoothly.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#105

Post by nicbou »

rkachowski wrote: post #91
pintxo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berlin did not have mobile connections inside the tunnels until very recently (this year, I believe). This included the trains not being connected to any outside network. Thus wifi on the subway was useless to implement.

Despite Berlin's general lack of parity with modern technology, I've never actually had a problem with internet access across the ubahn network in the past decade. I noticed that certain carriers used to have very different availability when travelling and so switched to a better one, but I was always surprised at being able to handle mobile data whilst underground.

Really? I don't even get consistent internet on the Ringbahn. There are lots of holes in the coverage in Berlin.

Which provider are you with? Vodafone is still dead in large parts of the U-Bahn, but I know that one of them works much better.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#106

Post by nicbou »

saagarjha wrote: post #46
pintxo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berlin did not have mobile connections inside the tunnels until very recently (this year, I believe). This included the trains not being connected to any outside network. Thus wifi on the subway was useless to implement.

I was in Berlin earlier this month and the cellular connections underground were quite good now. So maybe this is less of a problem?

It's provider-specific

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#107

Post by 1oooqooq »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #83

Why do writers like this feel so entitled to engineering effort from companies? Maybe companies don’t want to plow millions into microoptimising their sites so a handful of people in Antarctica can access them, when the vast majority of their clients can use their sites just fine.

your comment is self defeating.

for example, the audience of a site might be in southern Africa, with same bad connectivity, but the EU/UN site developers are in the north so they don't care and the consequences are in program adoption that fails to blame that. Or you might be doing business with a coffee producer and now your spiffy ERP is missing data because it's too much effort for them to update the orders, so your procurement team have to hire an intern to do it over the phone costing you an extra 2k a month. Or which is more likely for the crowd here, yall losing clients left and right because your lazy sysadmin blocked entire country ip ranges because once they saw a single DoS wave from there.

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#109

Post by fragmede »

chipdart wrote: post #29
Tepix wrote: post #26

I had a similar experience as the author on a boat in the south pacific. Starlink was available but often wasn't used because of its high power usage (60+ watts). So we got local SIM cards instead which provided 4G internet in some locations and EDGE (2G) in others. EDGE by itself isn't too bad on paper - you get a couple dozen kilobits per second. In reality, it was much worse. I ran into apps with short timeouts th…

> Low bandwith, high latency connections need to be part of the regular testing of software. One size does not fit all. It would be a waste of time and effort to architect (or redesign) an app just because a residual subset of potential users might find themselves on a boat in the middle of the Pacific. Let's keep things in perspective: some projects even skip testing WebApps on more than one browser because they dee…

it's not a total redesign, it's just raising a timeout from 30 to 3000

Re: Engineering for Slow Internet

#110

Post by vmfunction »

padolsey wrote: post #43

A 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…

>A lot of this resonates. I'm not in Antartica, I'm in Beijing, but still struggle with the internet.

Not even that, with outer space travel, we all need to build for very slow internet and long latency. Devs do need to time-travel back to 2005.

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