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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

#91

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

hughesjj wrote: post #87
noitpmeder wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean, there's a reason ajax took off in the first place. Member having to reload the entire page on every user interaction? Member iframes? Member flash and silver light and java applets? With stuff like web sockets/Web rtc /whatever new awesome sauce is out today a lot of that has changed, but that's still really the same spirit of ajax anyway, just with actual persistent connections instead of hacking it with lon…

AJAX took off because it's good for interactivity. If your "AJAX" requests are literally blocking the functionality of the website then they're no better than returning a big HTML blob. Your page just takes longer to load and the user experience is worse.

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

#92

Post by marcyb5st »

Jamie9912 wrote: post #76

Even if you have gigabit in Australia, the latency when browsing Youtube and clicking through menus is a world of difference when you compare it to the US

Is it the same while watching videos (i.e. a lot of buffering or similar)? I thought that YT caches popular content close to end users [1].

[1] https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure -> Under the edge nodes part

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

#93

Post by cdogl »

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…

I'm in Melbourne and this is indeed one of the fastest websites I use. But most websites are bloated JavaScript apps with a gazillion assets so it's chalk and cheese really.

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

#94

Post by heipei »

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…

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 page navigation in the SPA (images, XHR), these are all fired off in parallel, and none of these are blocking anything. A CDN would probably improve things slightly, but currently we don't feel like we need it.

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

#95

Post by marginalia_nu »

heipei wrote: post #94
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…

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.

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

#96

Post by rozenmd »

citrin_ru wrote: post #85
rozenmd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I just built a tool to visualise this if you want to check it out: https://onlineornot.com/do-i-need-a-cdn?url=https://bitbucke...

Do they test full rendering time or only RTT? Also it would be useful to know IP addresses from which test request are being made. Tested a site hosted in Hetzner and got 135ms latency from Frankfurt which is unexpectedly high. Ping RTT from some US east networks to this site is around 120-150ms, how it shows the same latency within DE?

Just RTT - it downloads the whole webpage content (equivalent of running curl )

I run the checks via AWS Lambda for now, might put it somewhere more stable like Hetzner/DigitalOcean for better accuracy.

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

#98

Post by ssss11 »

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…

I blame adtech without even knowing if it is the cause in each instance. Some news sites have like 50+ trackers lol.

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

#99

Post by sargun »

AFAIK, there is no generic datastore that does multi-region, with moving around the leader for a given subset of data available. Something like what's written in the Spanner paper would be amazing (microshards, and moving around microshards based on user access) if it was accessible.

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

#100

Post by trinovantes »

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…

We're now supposed to optimize for First Contentful Paint metric which benefits from tiny initial requests (ideally inlined css/js) rather than giant bundled js/css files
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