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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

#71

Post by nottorp »

vjk800 wrote: post #28
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…

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?

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

#72

Post by Dalewyn »

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…

>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 ye olde Web 1.0 days.

Waiter: "Your clam chowder, sir."

You: "Thanks!"

If the waiter brings you the chowder piece by piece, spoon by spoon on the other hand...

Waiter: "Your bowl, sir."

You: "I thought I ordered clam chowder?"

Waiter: "Your clam, sir."

You: "Uhh--"

Waiter: "Another clam, sir."

You: "What are yo--"

Waiter: "Some soup, sir."

You: "..."

Waiter: "An onion, sir."

Waiter: "Another clam, sir."

Waiter: "A potato, sir."

Waiter: "Another onion, sir."

Waiter: "Some more soup, sir."

Waiter: "And your spoon, sir."

You: "What the fuck."

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

#73

Post by arghwhat »

yuuuuuuuu wrote: post #40
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.

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 "daaang" rating.

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

#74

Post by noitpmeder »

arghwhat wrote: post #68
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 cach…

There is no reason why most sites can't return one pregenerated static HTML blob. The number of async requests is a killer.

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

#75

Post by drewmol »

TekMol wrote: post #25
samwillis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cod…

Interesting for me: reddit.com made 136 requests, 2.3MB Transferred, 3.0MB resources loaded by page ireddit.com 254 requests, 19.2 MB!! transferred 22.3 MB resources

old.reddit.com was 10 requests, 5kB transferred, 9kB resources I tried mbasic.facebook.com and interestingly it was (not logged in) only 1 request 1.1kB transferred, 1.1kB resources

I turned off any browser level blocking, but I do have some network level ad-blocking. I wonder why you get 111 more requests for (www.)reddit.com than I do.

Those(mbasic.facebook, old.reddit) are the old/basic interfaces I use regularly and both are requirements for me, I won't use their normal websites or apps so if they get shutdown I would leave for good.

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

#77

Post by rozenmd »

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…

Here, I built a tool to help you visualise what response times are like from around the world so that you "buy this" idea:

https://onlineornot.com/do-i-need-a-cdn?url=https://news.yco...

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

#78

Post by noitpmeder »

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?

Because most sites aren't interested in their users who use bad hardware as a market share. The most attractive client base are the ones with money to spend.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

noitpmeder wrote: post #74
arghwhat wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no reason why most sites can't return one pregenerated static HTML blob. The number of async requests is a killer.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by bleuarff »

bruce511 wrote: post #48
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…

>> 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…

About bundling assets I'm not convinced. I've run a year-long test where 50% of our users would download a single JS bundle, and the others would use about a dozen distinct files. All using HTTP/2. I've checked every metric I could think of to see what's best. In the end the not-bundled pages would be a tiny bit quicker to load, but I the few milliseconds of difference was not significant. So I stopped bothering and do not bundle my JS anymore.
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