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Why is the Internet so Slow?

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Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#51

Post by majewsky »

infinisil wrote: post #34

ETHZ is developing a new kind of internet architecture: https://scion-architecture.net/ It's deployed in some places and working already. Citing from the webpage: > SCION is the first clean-slate Internet architecture designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communications. Also it will reduce latency, increase throughput and more, as mentioned in the papers.…

Fixed link that doesn't fail on incorrect certificate: https://www.scion-architecture.net/

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#53

Post by the8472 »

xaedes wrote: post #47
the8472 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really shouldn't be complaining about the speed of light. We're leaving a lot on the table by sending the data along the surface of earth instead of through it. With neutrino-based signalling you eliminate both the lower propagation speed and the suboptimal path.

Couldn't satellite distributed quantum entanglement also accomplish sending messages "through" the earth once properly set up? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-shatters-ld... http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/two-steps-closer-t...

No, that is a common misconception. Quantum teleportation always requires a classical communication side-channel and thus is bounded by the same speed limitations as the classical link.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#54

Post by zkms »

Since the OP compared Internet latencies to the speed of light in glass...look up 802.1CM/IEEE1904.3 or "CPRI over Ethernet"/"Radio over Ethernet"! Those describe techniques for conveying LTE baseband signals (digital I/Q-samples) over Ethernet -- so the radios can live far away from the equipment that speaks the physical / MAC / radio-resource-control layers of LTE. There are strict latency/jitter requirements involved (the phone and the eNB run a very fast automatic-repeat-request protocol between each other, too much latency breaks the loop) -- and large (but predictable) data rates involved.

Read https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Xurc4m_PVsZ1lzWWoxS0pTNVE... for a general introduction about latency in Ethernet/IP networks and http://www.ieee802.org/1/files/public/docs2016/cm-chen-front... for an introduction to the "radio over ethernet business"

Even if you're not trying to send radio baseband data over ethernet networks -- there's lots of noticeable queuing going on, everywhere. It's not just the unmanaged and pathological "bufferbloat" queues (that occur when a device has a network link much faster than its other network link) -- there's little queues that are used for tasks like:

* frame aggregation

* holding onto data until a shared medium is idle

* for scheduled systems like DOCSIS or LTE, holding onto packets until an uplink grant has been given -- or holding onto packets until a station's downlink grant/timeslot becomes active

* inter-device communication (usually with ring buffers or the like)

* any processing/forwarding that isn't of the cut-through flavour usually involves queuing at least a single frame

* context switching / memory copying / interrupts

Retransmission mechanisms can introduce latency as well -- if there's no special channel for acknowledgements, they'll use up airtime, and if data needs to be retransmitted, it might induce delays for never-transmitted data that's waiting for its first transmit opportunity.

In general, unless you're actively being paid to stomp out every imaginable source of latency, there'll be little queues living everywhere in your system -- from TCP's queues right on down to the CPU's store buffers-- because queuing is the natural way to cope with subsystems that produce/consume at different rates.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#56

Post by vbernat »

baybal2 wrote: post #15
cathleenv87 wrote: post #4

You should move to Romania. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5aa3/why-romani...

A lot of latency inflation over past 10 yeara came from increase in L3 switchings over L2. Nowadays, you can have over 10 IP switching in DCs, and within the last mile. You also get more hops thanks to some backbone networks abandoning MPLS in favour of native routing/packet labeling. In Romania, as I understand, networks are largely free of L3 switching overhead thanks to large portion of networks running pure L2

Most switches are routing switches and the same pipeline is used for both L2 switching and L3 routing. There is no sensible difference in switching and routing unless the switch has the ability to completely disable L3 routing. The typical latency is 500ns in store-and-forward mode (cut-through fallbacks to store-and-forward in most situations). If L2 processing could be done in 300ns, this is 200ns. With 10 routers, this is 0.002 milliseconds. Not something noticeable. Even if you compare with cut-through switching which could lower the latency to 50ns, that's still only a 0.005 milliseconds penality.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#57

Post by dukwon »

sgift wrote: post #24
the8472 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really shouldn't be complaining about the speed of light. We're leaving a lot on the table by sending the data along the surface of earth instead of through it. With neutrino-based signalling you eliminate both the lower propagation speed and the suboptimal path.

Has neutrino-based signalling been achieved or is it still a research topic? Last time I read about it it was more a case of "if we could do this it would be great, but we have no idea how to do it" and a quick Google search only brought a Forbes article from 2012 which had a similar sentiment.

> Has neutrino-based signalling been achieved or is it still a research topic?

An accelerator- or reactor-based neutrino experiment can detect whether the source is on or off, so in principle you can send binary information. This has been demonstrated using NuMI/MINERvA [1]. It's more of a novelty than anything practical.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#58

Post by enthdegree »

IanKelling wrote: post #50

CDF = cumulative distribution function People who care about how fast the internet is are not the same set as people who know statistics acronyms, and they don't show up in a simple web search. You know how else we can make the internet better and faster? Publishing articles with software and licenses that make it easy for people to improve and share your article.

If you are unfamiliar with basic statistical concepts it is hard to believe you will be able to provide any compelling contributions to making the internet faster.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#59

Post by arcbyte »

3pt14159 wrote: post #7

If you want an easy speed up and you use a modern version of nginx, which you should for many reasons but chiefly performance and security. Add these lines to your nginx config file: # Only support HTTPS and enable http2 # which will allow you to multiplex requests. # In a separate config do a 301 from normal HTTP # for all paths / subdomains. listen 443 ssl http2 default_server; listen [::]:443 ssl http2 default_ser…

HTTP2 is a garbage protocol and I continue to refuse to deploy it in our enterprise.

Will wait for something else.

Re: Why is the Internet so Slow?

#60

Post by tutanchamun »

majewsky wrote: post #51
infinisil wrote: post #34

ETHZ is developing a new kind of internet architecture: https://scion-architecture.net/ It's deployed in some places and working already. Citing from the webpage: > SCION is the first clean-slate Internet architecture designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communications. Also it will reduce latency, increase throughput and more, as mentioned in the papers.…

Fixed link that doesn't fail on incorrect certificate: https://www.scion-architecture.net/

Thanks, is there a reason for sites not 301 redirecting non-www to www urls or vice-versa? Wouldn't that help to avoid problems like these?

They also don't implement any security headers: https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze.html?host=scion-arch...

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