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Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

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Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

#111

Post by arghwhat »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #91
hughesjj wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there's a reason ajax took off in the first place. Member having to reload the entire page on every user interaction? Member iframes? Member flash and silver light and java applets? With stuff like web sockets/Web rtc /whatever new awesome sauce is out today a lot of that has changed, but that's still really the same spirit of ajax anyway, just with actual persistent connections instead of hacking it with lon…

AJAX took off because it's good for interactivity. If your "AJAX" requests are literally blocking the functionality of the website then they're no better than returning a big HTML blob. Your page just takes longer to load and the user experience is worse.

Returning new HTML blobs will never be faster than an equivalent AJAX roundtrip. In other words, if AJAX is slow when "literally blocking", fetching new HTML is at least that slow as well.

Static HTML only has a potential latency benefit on first load due to the ability to save render-blocking resource roundtrips. For later requests where those resources are already fetched, it only adds bandwidth overhead.

Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

#112

Post by taneq »

progval wrote: post #10
TekMol wrote: post #8

I don't buy this. Hacker News is one of the most responsive websites I know. And it is run on a single server somewhere in the USA. While I am in Europe. If you have users in Sydney, Australia ... ... you are floored at 104ms of latency for your request When I open AirBnB with a clean browser cache, it takes several seconds until I see something useful. Those 104ms of latency don't make a dent. Reddit takes over 5 se…

Browsing HN only needs one round-trip (fetch the HTML), maybe two if you don't have it cached (fetch the CSS). Many apps need more round-trips, by loading assets sequentially. For example: fetch the HTML, then the JS, then the JS downloads its config, then the JS fetches some assets. Latency accumulates with every round-trip.

I'm long out of web dev, but... is this really how (well designed) web apps work? It seems lazy, you should be able to statically generate a list of most, if not all, assets and queue them all up simultaneously.

With only a tiny bit more effort you could improve things even further by generating 'resource packs' (just zip files really) like games do, that you can load and then unpack locally.

Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

#113

Post by oefrha »

littlestymaar wrote: post #47
progval wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsing HN only needs one round-trip (fetch the HTML), maybe two if you don't have it cached (fetch the CSS). Many apps need more round-trips, by loading assets sequentially. For example: fetch the HTML, then the JS, then the JS downloads its config, then the JS fetches some assets. Latency accumulates with every round-trip.

> Browsing HN only needs one round-trip It's never just one round-trip: the TCP handshake is one round-trip in itself, then there's the TLS handshake needing two addionnal round-trips, and only then comes the HTTP round trip. So the minimum latency you can have to load just the HTML is in fact 4 times the round-trip time. (And I left DNS aside, because the DNS resolution process involves talking to different servers…

> It's never just one round-trip

That’s not true. TLS 1.3 0-RTT cuts down on handshake roundtrips, taking one roundtrip to establish the TCP connection before data can be sent; and HTTP/3 (QUIC) with 0-RTT actually makes it zero roundtrip, HTTP request is sent directly and response is received in one roundtrip.

Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

#115

Post by oefrha »

taneq wrote: post #112
progval wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsing HN only needs one round-trip (fetch the HTML), maybe two if you don't have it cached (fetch the CSS). Many apps need more round-trips, by loading assets sequentially. For example: fetch the HTML, then the JS, then the JS downloads its config, then the JS fetches some assets. Latency accumulates with every round-trip.

I'm long out of web dev, but... is this really how (well designed) web apps work? It seems lazy, you should be able to statically generate a list of most, if not all, assets and queue them all up simultaneously. With only a tiny bit more effort you could improve things even further by generating 'resource packs' (just zip files really) like games do, that you can load and then unpack locally.

Which is why I get a heart attack whenever I hear people talk about forgoing bundlers and using esm imports for dependencies directly in production. Some will tell you that dozens/hundreds of small requests aren’t a problem since h2 can load them simultaneously in the same connection. What they don’t mention is the cascade of roundtrips as imported deps are parsed from scripts. Apparently they don’t care because they assume all users live 20ms from their data canters.

Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

#116

Post by burntcaramel »

As an Australian, I agree that I usually prefer when a service is hosted nearby. Yet… 200ms latency, that’s pretty good actually. For some real data, I just tried `ping ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com` and time is 240ms. That’s in Tasmania, NBN over Wifi. I’m happy with that!

But the problem, like many of the other commenters are saying, is for a single request us-east-1 is actually fine. But for a modern web app but many requests, that compounds real quick. I actually think living here is an advantage as a web developer because it’s like those athletes that only train at high altitudes — living in a high latency environment means you notice problems easily.

Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

#117

Post by selfhoster69 »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #106
rozenmd wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here, I built a tool to help you visualise what response times are like from around the world so that you "buy this" idea: https://onlineornot.com/do-i-need-a-cdn?url=https://news.yco...

Where are the request servers hosted? What's the peering like for those hosts? I feel like people also often forget that bad peering by ISP can have a big influence on the overall latency.

Yep, this is the reason why I'm hesitant to switch ISPs despite crappy service during peak hours. They have PNIs/local CDN hostings/prominent IX peering and good international peering.

Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

#118

Post by criley2 »

citrin_ru wrote: post #83
fragmede wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the competency of your ISP and how aggressive they are about so-called features. In several cases, the ISP provided DNS decided not to return NX results and instead returned a page of ads which was great for email servers, back in the day. The other failure mode I've seen is that the ISP's DNS servers are overloaded and take several seconds to respond.

Several cases is no enough reason for me to avoid ISP DNS by default, many if not most ISP don’t spoof NXDOMAIN and provide fast DNS.

There's also the reality that using your ISP's DNS almost entirely moots any VPN you use. The main reason to use a VPN is to hide your browsing from your ISP and anyone your ISP might be reporting to (in the US for example we've seen several programs where the government intercepts ISP data at special places in interconnects, so even if your ISP publicly says your DNS is safe, it could actually be logged to a spy database associated to you)

When you use a VPN and then immediately send all your DNS lookups right back to your ISP... Hey I wonder where this person is actually from! Maybe the geographical area of the regional ISP that all their DNS lookups are coming from...

Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

#119

Post by taneq »

oefrha wrote: post #115
taneq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm long out of web dev, but... is this really how (well designed) web apps work? It seems lazy, you should be able to statically generate a list of most, if not all, assets and queue them all up simultaneously. With only a tiny bit more effort you could improve things even further by generating 'resource packs' (just zip files really) like games do, that you can load and then unpack locally.

Which is why I get a heart attack whenever I hear people talk about forgoing bundlers and using esm imports for dependencies directly in production. Some will tell you that dozens/hundreds of small requests aren’t a problem since h2 can load them simultaneously in the same connection. What they don’t mention is the cascade of roundtrips as imported deps are parsed from scripts. Apparently they don’t care because they…

Sadly this seems to be industry-wide these days, so many things don't work well (or at all!) without a fast internet connection. Most recent example that's been bugging me is Explorer in Windows still connects synchronously to network shares as far as I can tell.

Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

#120

Post by mduggles »

It’s a solvable problem if you optimize for multiple regions from day 1 of the app but migrating an existing stack to multi-region after the fact is often a large enough undertaking that you pick the region of the majority of users and go with it.

The process of setting up an active passive region with the db is becoming more common but an active/active design is still relatively rare outside of apps designed for massive scale.

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