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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

#121

Post by selfhoster69 »

kiwijamo wrote: post #24
re-thc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DNS is probably 2 round trips (CNAME then A), and that has to cross the ocean via your resolver of choice I hope your DNS doesn't have to do that. Most anycast DNS should have lots of PoPs (regions) and are really fast. CDNs usually solve a lot of the static asset issues. The main issue is the database.

People should use their ISP's DNS as well which is often <5ms. I've never bothered using an off-net DNS provider for this reason given how much faster is it to use an on-net caching DNS resolver provided by my ISP.

In my experience, ISPs DNS servers are slower compared to 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1, especially for "complex" lookups where there are as many as 6 CNAMEs in the DNS chain.

Also, they often run a single instance of bind, with little to no load-balancing.

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

#122

Post by rcme »

cbzoiav wrote: post #45
vjk800 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN front page isn't filled with garbage and loaded with a million lines of pointless javascript like all other sites you mentioned. HN front page is 27 kb in size while, for example, reddit is 943 kb. Performance issues with websites are entirely a self-made problem. There are plenty of fast, lean and yet very functional web pages like HN that prove that prove it.

Size isn't even the worst of it. It's number of requests. You need to go through a TCP handshake for every connection you open. You can reuse the connection but that means queuing requests and hitting the latency as a multiplier. Browsers also have a cap on parallel connections so when you get enough requests it queues either way. HTTP/2 reduces the problem with multiplexing but it still doesn't go away. If your app…

HTTP/2 supports request multiplexing so you don’t need multiple connections or queuing to fetch multiple resources.

The bigger issue is that a lot of requests are dependent on previous requests so all the latency adds up. E.g. when you fetch Reddit, it only downloads the JavaScript and then fetches the post content. The move away from server rendering of webpages has really made things slower.

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

#124

Post by selfhoster69 »

criley2 wrote: post #118
citrin_ru wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dat…

In India, internet providers already provide a portal to the police and other agencies with no accountability.

https://entrackr.com/2022/11/exclusive-indian-isps-we-alread...

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

#125

Post by sgt »

js2 wrote: post #18

I've been doing this long enough that I remember when all the big web sites were hosted in California. In fact, my company had its web farm in Sunnyvale which we managed over frame relay from Atlanta. Whenever I'd visit the west coast, I was shocked how much faster the web seemed. So I sympathize with the sentiment. Thing is though, the entire web feels pretty sluggish to me these days. And that's with us-east-1 less…

I've even seen sites that don't load properly or aren't usable before the cookie banner renders, which may be loaded inefficiently from somewhere else. It's tragic!

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

#126

Post by TacticalCoder »

arghwhat wrote: post #73
yuuuuuuuu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly GP's point, right? No matter us-east-1 or not, what makes things slow has nothing to do with DC location. That latency is insignificant.

HN takes - when fully cached, where it only takes 1 request - ~200ms to load, so 3/4ths of the pageload is just the roundtrip. HN user experience in EU is "meh" because HN is one of the fastest loading dynamic pages on the web to load, meant to give you whiplash from the load speed. Not all pages can load with 1 request, even when designed well, so they will be sub-"meh". HN, if hosted in EU, would have gotten a "daa…

> HN user experience in EU is "meh"

It's not: it's super quick, the fastest website I check on a daily basis, by very far. If only all the web could be like this!

Which is user tekmol 's point: "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."

HN is great in the EU. If most of the pageloading is just the roundtrip, you've already won, no matter if your users are on the same continent as your unique server or not.

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

#127

Post by sgt »

burntcaramel wrote: post #116

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 man…

That puts things into perspective for us in South Africa*. My RTT to Europe is about 170-180ms. It used to be a bit better, not sure what happened. But the point is that it's just barely within what I would consider "fast" in relation to Europe.

(*) Similar to AU, we're also in the middle of "nowhere"

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

#128

Post by 411111111111111 »

bob1029 wrote: post #69
cbzoiav wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size isn't even the worst of it. It's number of requests. You need to go through a TCP handshake for every connection you open. You can reuse the connection but that means queuing requests and hitting the latency as a multiplier. Browsers also have a cap on parallel connections so when you get enough requests it queues either way. HTTP/2 reduces the problem with multiplexing but it still doesn't go away. If your app…

> It's number of requests. Absolutely. This is the prime hallmark of shitty, slow web. If you fight your battles here everything else will fall into place. I've started building our B2B web apps where the server returns 1 final, static HTML document in response to every resource. There are no separate js/css resource URLs at all in our products anymore. Anything we need is interpolated into the final HTML document sc…

For the record: a PWA can also be served by a single request, it's called hydration.

My issue with these kinds of discussions is that they're inevitably using outright false arguments.

You can make a well performing website through SSR and a backend templating language, yes.

However , In a business setting with lots of developers this usually becomes an abhorrently performing website despite the SSR with the same templating language.

You can make a pwa with any of the usual frameworks and it's going to perform wonderfully... The bad performance begins when people start to write terrible code or just keep adding dependencies to cyberstalk their users.

But doing the same in the backend puts you into the same position wrt poor performance, so it's just not an argument for or against SPAs.

It's totally fine if you decide to write your website with a SSR stack however, and it could very well be the better choice for you, depending on how your skillset is aligned with the technology.

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

#129

Post by strken »

nottorp wrote: post #71
vjk800 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN front page isn't filled with garbage and loaded with a million lines of pointless javascript like all other sites you mentioned. HN front page is 27 kb in size while, for example, reddit is 943 kb. Performance issues with websites are entirely a self-made problem. There are plenty of fast, lean and yet very functional web pages like HN that prove that prove it.

Q1: Why would round trip latency matter so much when the modern web 45.0 adds so much overhead? Q2: Why don't we just force all the SV techbros to test their sites - AND their browsers - on a $200 notebook with eMMC storage from 2 years ago?

It matters a lot. I just spent three days on a 130kbps 1000+ms latency high packet loss connection, and RTT was one of the problems that made lots of sites I tried (practically) unusable, due to launching dependent queries in series without any retries. The other big one was gigantic interaction-blocking assets served from CDNs with aggressive timeouts.

SV techbros are a fun pinata to smash, but that's a load of bullshit intended to conflate individual workers (easily hateable and zero power to fix anything) with ad-tech/paywalls/lead acquisition/overoptimisation driven by profit-seeking (too diffuse to hate, too little understood for lawmakers to regulate effectively...yet), and make slow websites seem like a technical or competency problem instead of an auctioning-your-eyeballs-and-spamming-you-with-modals.

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

#130

Post by ketchupdebugger »

aerio wrote: post #23
snailtrail wrote: post #9

[flagged]

Sounds like you didn't read the article properly and missed the authors argument that using CDN's are more important than people think. Better luck next time!

The author is not correct though, as with any webapp these are not static content that you can host on a cdn. These are dynamic content that needs to be loaded. Adding a mutliregion architecture is complicated.

As a side note, I also know which apps are hosted on us-east-1. I just need to look at the us-east-1 aws incident from last month and which apps were affected.

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