Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironic for an Australian co's GitHub alternative to be less responsive than GitHub itself in Australia.
Add to that Github is also in the same region as Bitbucket.
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Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
21–30 of 193 posts
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#22I 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…
I think cloudflare is in front of HN these days
It is not. A simple traceroute shows traffic from Auckland, New Zealand is routed all the way to the San Diego via Los Angeles. Cloudflare sites typically have traceroutes terminating here at Auckland (best case scenario) or in some cases across the pond in Sydney, Australia.
It is interesting to note however I don't observe much latency issues despite a 130ms round trip.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#23[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!
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#24The speed of light in a fiber optic cable is slower than light in a vacuum, about 2.14e8 m/s. If you feel latency, it's probably not the one-direction or round-trip latency, but rather the MANY round trips that are typically required for an HTTP request. DNS is probably 2 round trips (CNAME then A), and that has to cross the ocean via your resolver of choice (8.8.8.8 or whatever) to get to the authoritative server if…
> 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.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, HN is not just one request, it is 7. And no, latency does not accumulate. Because the browser requests assets in parallel as it loads the html. Also, assets can easily be routed through a CDN.
Latency absolutely does accumulate for code as the parent described that cannot make a request until the previous one has returned (images linked from css files for example, or a spa with poorly chunked code). There is a lot of that code out there. "Modern" tooling and practices reduce that, but it not a solved problem for the majority of legacy code.
You describe the issue of dependencies.
You don't need modern tooling to prevent it. A server side build step to combine assets only makes things worse. Because on first load you get bombed with a giant blob of code you don't need. Or the developers get lost in the complexity of it and it becomes a giant hairball of chaos. The Twitter homepage takes 185 requests to load. AirBnB 240. Reddit 247. Look at the source code to see the chaos their build systems create.
Simply using a server side rendred html page and native javascript modules prevents all of that. The modules get loaded asynchronously. So the modules and their dependencies have time to load until all the html interface and the asynchronous assets like CSS, images etc are loaded and rendered. And then the modules can kick in.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think cloudflare is in front of HN these days
It is not. A simple traceroute shows traffic from Auckland, New Zealand is routed all the way to the San Diego via Los Angeles. Cloudflare sites typically have traceroutes terminating here at Auckland (best case scenario) or in some cases across the pond in Sydney, Australia. It is interesting to note however I don't observe much latency issues despite a 130ms round trip.
~150ms is usually acceptable especially if there's no Javascript and other extra delays. >=200ms is usually. where it really shows.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#27Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36506865
Particularly the part quoted in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36507013
But tbh I think this is mainly a problem for apps that have a long chain of dependent requests. If you make 3 requests one after the other, it's probably fine. If the DOM isn't stable until after a series of 10 requests, any amount of latency is noticeable.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#28I 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…
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.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#29I mostly notice edge hosted apps as a problem now. Some newfangled sites have horrible cold start times if they are not too busy in Europe.
Re: Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1
#30I 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…
HN is an old fashioned text based thing with no bells or whistles whatsoever. Of course it's responsive.
Yet this is all I ask for as a user.