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

blog.jonlu.ca

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

#61

Post by hunter2_ »

jaggederest wrote: post #56
bruce511 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> has to make 40 requests pulling in js files, CSS files fonts So it's 2023 and I've been concatenation all my css, and all my js, into a single css and js request since like 2005. So a call to the site results in maybe 3 or 4 requests, not 40. But I've noticed most sites don't do this. Perhaps because I was trained when we had 28k modems not 100mb fibre? Http/2 makes a big deal of multiplexing, but its less convinc…

Remember back in the old days when people used to concatenate images into imagemaps and specify the coordinates and dimensions? One image file for a whole site. Same goes back when we could just load a single library from the Google public version (cough-jquery-cough) and then all the on-page JS was just in-tag handlers. Not that it was better but boy howdy was it faster to load.

You're probably thinking of CSS sprites, if you mean only displaying a certain portion of the image file at a time. An image map is when you display the whole image file as-is, but have different clickable links at different coordinates/dimensions.

The former is specifically for reducing requests, while the latter is more about UX.

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

#62

Post by rbinv »

jaggederest wrote: post #56
bruce511 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> has to make 40 requests pulling in js files, CSS files fonts So it's 2023 and I've been concatenation all my css, and all my js, into a single css and js request since like 2005. So a call to the site results in maybe 3 or 4 requests, not 40. But I've noticed most sites don't do this. Perhaps because I was trained when we had 28k modems not 100mb fibre? Http/2 makes a big deal of multiplexing, but its less convinc…

Remember back in the old days when people used to concatenate images into imagemaps and specify the coordinates and dimensions? One image file for a whole site. Same goes back when we could just load a single library from the Google public version (cough-jquery-cough) and then all the on-page JS was just in-tag handlers. Not that it was better but boy howdy was it faster to load.

The original Space Jam (1996) site does this for navigation (and it still works fine): https://www.spacejam.com/1996/cmp/jamcentral/jamcentralframe...

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

#64

Post by lordnacho »

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…

> Thing is though, the entire web feels pretty sluggish to me these days. And that's with us-east-1 less than 300 miles away from me. Because most web sites aren't slow due to where they're hosted, but rather because of how bloated with crap most of them have become.

It doesn't seem much faster than it seemed in 1995 when I first got online. There's much more stuff, but the latency doesn't really seem much better.

It's probably commercial: people don't mind wasting 3-4 seconds at a time loading Reddit/FB/etc and in that time a whole bunch of code that's useful to the website operator is loaded. All the stuff that tracks what you're up to.

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

#65

Post by fragmede »

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.

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.

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

#66

Post by greiskul »

jaggederest wrote: post #56
bruce511 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> has to make 40 requests pulling in js files, CSS files fonts So it's 2023 and I've been concatenation all my css, and all my js, into a single css and js request since like 2005. So a call to the site results in maybe 3 or 4 requests, not 40. But I've noticed most sites don't do this. Perhaps because I was trained when we had 28k modems not 100mb fibre? Http/2 makes a big deal of multiplexing, but its less convinc…

Remember back in the old days when people used to concatenate images into imagemaps and specify the coordinates and dimensions? One image file for a whole site. Same goes back when we could just load a single library from the Google public version (cough-jquery-cough) and then all the on-page JS was just in-tag handlers. Not that it was better but boy howdy was it faster to load.

Google used css sprites for Google+. They cared a lot about speed, specially for the stream, with even some CSS constructs that were known to be slow were banned from use for rendering posts.

For css sprites, you could submit an image to a folder in the monorepo, and a couple of minutes later an automated system would update the image with all the sprites, and create constants that you could you in your templates/css to use the icons with the coordinates/size of the image.

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

#67

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

There's a few factors to keep in mind. HN is much smaller, uses less resources, less individual files; less roundtrips (of the hypothetical 104 ms) to get all the resources.

HTTP / TCP overhead and throttling is another factor; there's a few bounces back and forth before a request can be fulfilled.

However, the factor here is that with http/2 and other advancements, the number of roundtrips and the number of requests needed to get resources is reduced by a lot. HTTP 1 needed one request per resource, HTTP 2 and 3 can bundle them into the same connection. I'm not explaining it very well, there's good resources out there.

anyway, HN is an example of old internet style websites, where latency is compensated for by the webpages just being small and snappy. A lot of advances in things like latency and speed have been undone by heavier websites.

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

#68

Post by arghwhat »

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…

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 cached, this becomes ~200ms. Considering that the roundtrip is 168ms, this means that the vast majority of the pageload is just waiting for bytes to cross the atlantic. The roundtrip to eu-central is 30-50ms in comparison, less than 1/3rd. 3 times faster pageload is a significant UX difference.

Now, the reason we accept it with HN is that HN is just a list of direct anchor tags - the majority of the content is other websites. If the page had been more interactive, firing requests and dynamically fetching content, it would feel sluggish at best.

The difference in UX caused by latency is huge.

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

#69

Post by bob1029 »

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…

> 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 script or style tag by the server.

If you back up for a few minutes and really think about what kind of power you get with server-side rendering relative to # of requests... It's a gigantic deal. Composing complex client views shouldn't happen on the client. It should happen on the server where all of the answers already live. 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?

In terms of latency, the game theory for me is simple: Either do it in exactly one request, or it doesn't matter how many requests it takes. That said... caching effects are really important for many applications, and separating sources out can save you a lot of $$$ at scale. So, you will need to balance the UX and economic effects of some of these choices.

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

#70

Post by 867-5309 »

no mention, or realisation, of the storage and bandwidth requirements for hosting anything other than text. html, js and database queries are cheap to stick on a global CDN, but when it comes to larger multimedia files, such as images and videos, the costs soon skyrocket
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