For more pings check out: https://wondernetwork.com/pings
I believe that’s the source he’s using.
Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
131–140 of 193 posts
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#132I usually get ~300ms ping from my home to us-east-1. You can absolutely feel the latency, especially on SPAs that performs many small xhr sequentially which compounds the latency even more. Apps that felt almost instant when used in network with Some of my worst experience was being forced to use SFTP to transfer thousands of small files to a server in us-east-1, which can take hours due to latency alone compared to transferring the same set of files using rsync / compressed archive which finish in minutes, and using RDP to access a remote windows machine behind a VPN, then run putty there to access a Linux server (the VPN only allows RDP traffics), and then I need to transfer thousands of files to the Linux server as well (my solution was to punch a hole through their shitty VPN via an intermediary bastion host I fully control, which allows me to use rsync).
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#133Earlier 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…
> Why make the client go read a bunch of information piles to re-assemble Humpty Dumpty every goddamn time they want to view the homepage?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but originally it was because "servers" had order-of client compute power. Ergo, it was necessary to offload as much compute to the client as possible.
And then in early js era it was because network latency and bandwidth limitations precluded server-client round-trips for anything user-interactive.
Now, we've got surplus compute and bandwidth on both sides (order-of text payloads), so caching architecture and tooling become the limiting factors.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As things get faster developers have to introduce lazier practices to maintain the same level of shittiness. Eliminate parallel request limit and they spam you with hundreds of scripts. Eliminate head of the line blocking and they come right back at you with cascade of dependencies blocking. Of course “things get faster” isn’t universal when it comes to network latency and throughput, so the experience strictly worsens for a subset of users.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. We run a very content/media-heavy SaaS SPA application completely out of a single location in Germany and have customers that are primarily located in the US, and also in places like Australia and Japan. We don't use any CDN, every request has to go to our origin in Germany. Yet customers regularly tell us how fast and snappy our application is. Why? While we do make dozens or even hundreds of requests per…
CDNs can actually add quite a bit of latency depending on where you're located. My server is located in Sweden, and for users in US West, access through Cloudflare adds like 100-150ms ping. It's very noticeable, bordering on intolerable for API access.
I wonder what your actual cache hit rate is? Sounds like it could use some tuning since 100-150ms sounds consistent with most requests hitting the origin?
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Why make the client go read a bunch of information piles to re-assemble Humpty Dumpty every goddamn time they want to view the homepage? Correct me if I'm wrong, but originally it was because "servers" had order-of client compute power. Ergo, it was necessary to offload as much compute to the client as possible. And then in early js era it was because network latency and bandwidth limitations precluded server-clien…
> "servers" had order-of client compute power
Still do. Biggest difference: If you intend to serve the same complexity of web experience today that you were trying to serve 20 years ago, you will find a single MacBook would likely be enough to handle the traffic. The challenge is that we've taken advantage of the exponential compute growth over the years and now it feels like we still have the exact same scaling issues on the server relative to the client.
If you constrain your product & design just a tiny bit, you can escape this horrible trap and enjoy those 4-5 orders of magnitude. If you design your website like Berkshire Hathaway or HN, you are on the right power curve. Seriously - go open Berkshire's website right now just to remind yourself how fast the web can be if you can lock that resume-driven ego crap in a box for a little bit.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#137I 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…
The reason HN loads in... 500ms in EU is that it takes exactly two roundtrips to load: One HTML blob, one render-blocking CSS. Rest is fast-ish abroad is because it takes exactly 2 somewhat lean roundtrips to load over the same TLS connection: One HTML blob, one CSS file, and the latter is cachable. There is JS, but it is loaded at the end. That is a hell of a lot better than the average website. When the CSS is cach…
> 3 times faster pageload is a significant UX difference.
Going from 3s to 1s would be significant. Going from 200ms to 67ms wouldn't be very significant. There are very diminishing UX returns when going below ~300ms.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. We run a very content/media-heavy SaaS SPA application completely out of a single location in Germany and have customers that are primarily located in the US, and also in places like Australia and Japan. We don't use any CDN, every request has to go to our origin in Germany. Yet customers regularly tell us how fast and snappy our application is. Why? While we do make dozens or even hundreds of requests per…
CDNs can actually add quite a bit of latency depending on where you're located. My server is located in Sweden, and for users in US West, access through Cloudflare adds like 100-150ms ping. It's very noticeable, bordering on intolerable for API access.
Is that CDN or DDOS protection? CDN should serve static assets near the user.
Has to be quicker unless something went very wrong.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#139Earlier 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…
>If your app has to make 40 requests pulling in js files, CSS files fonts, API calls etc. to show something useful that will be visibly slow To put this in a way the common man can appreciate, imagine you're at a restaurant and you ordered some clam chowder and your waiter brings it to you. If the waiter brings you the chowder complete in one bowl, you get the chowder then and there. That is HN and most websites from…
“RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:CHECK THIS OUT ABOUT MODERN WEB DEV LOL!”
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm on another hemisphere, diff continent (Africa) and closeish to the south pole. And even for me HN is very fast.