7 ms·

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 To this day, XMPP is a bandwidth-hungry, unreliable mess of

by stonogo 10y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810 To this day, XMPP is a bandwidth-hungry, unreliable mess of a protocol. Despite the enthusiasts having an XEP they can flash for every objection, the sad fact is servers and clients support varied subsets of XMPP, and it's a rare day when everyone involved supports all the features everyone wants to use. The author seems to think that XMPP is qualified to compete with WhatsApp. While WhatsApp recently abandoned several platforms, for many many years they had even S40 (dumbphone) support. I tried to find XMPP/Jabber clients for S40 phones for YEARS, and every single one I found would immediately crash with OOM errors. It's easy to blow off complaints like mine, because everyone on hackernews has a Samsung Universe S2000 or an iPhone 128 Plus, but these are real concerns that real people have in the real world. Wholly aside from network effects, even nontechnical users said "why do I need a smartphone to send text messages?" and "because XML" is not going to convince them. XMPP is just a bad protocol, a holdover from an era where gleefully wrapping everything in XML was the new hotness. I hope we're moving past Global XML Obsession, and I hope I don't have to hear XMPP evangelism once we get past.

Flowdalic 10y ago
Your claim that XMPP is a bandwidth-hungry, but in my experience, if XMPP based systems drain battery and consume a lot of bandwidth, then it's because of a poor implementation and design decisions, and not because of the protocol.
- roblabla 10y ago
  But your average user doesn't care about the distinction. If their XMPP-branded client is battery hungry, they're not going to look for another client. They're going to think xmpp is battery hungry and move on. That's where the problem is.
  - mkhpalm 10y ago
    But XMPP is a standard protocol... not a client or library. Should we all abandon HTTP because IE6 sucked? Thats the logical equivalent to the argument.
    - labster 10y ago
      Yes. Everything should use HTTPS now.
    - roblabla 10y ago
      There are two key differences : - There was no real alternative to the web. - More importantly, ie6 worked for the end-user. It only sucked for the developers.
  - stephenr 10y ago
    You're not giving people enough credit. They were able to identify that MSIE as a browser was terrible, and switch to Firefox/Chrome/etc.
    - roblabla 10y ago
      And yet MSIE still ruled the earth as a major pain in the foot in 2010, with a whooping 40% marketshare[0] (All versions of ie). It's only when chrome started doing very aggressive advertising that people started to switch. MSIE worked for most people. The devs suffered how bad it was, but the people didn't see that because most of the web was designed for it. That's the kind of power you get when you are lead in marketshare. We see that nowadays with websites that only work in chrome (though it's less of a problem, chrome is a lot more open to standards, and the engine is open source). Concerning branding, I still see a lot of people that think the internet is that "e" icon on their desktop. Other people think chrome is the only gateway to the internet. It's the same situation as when IE6 was the lead. People don't know about alternatives, or don't care. Either way, if their "internet app" sucks, it's generally that internet sucks. [0] Using https://www.w3counter.com/trends https://www.w3counter.com/trends as a source, don't know how accurate it is but it does match my memory of how it all happened.
      - stephenr 10y ago
        > And yet MSIE still ruled the earth as a major pain in the foot in 2010, with a whooping 40% marketshare That was largely related to large install bases in corporate/government/educational institutions where legacy requirements (e.g. we built/bought this IE-optimised internal mission-critical web app, and it shits its pants in other browsers). > It's only when chrome started doing very aggressive advertising that people started to switch. In 2010 Statcounter and W3 counter both give MSIE ~50% and Firefox ~30%. There was huge shift away from MSIE long before Chrome existed, and longer still before they started using shitty tactics to 'encourage' people to change from other perfectly functioning modern browsers.
sweden 10y ago
People are always bashing XMPP around but truth to be told, my experience with the Android client Conversations is pretty damn good. I use the Android client with a personal XMPP server based on Prosody and I frequently use it to communicate with a friend who is also running his own XMPP server and the experience is very good. We never lost a message, we can share pictures just like in WhatsApp, we can send any type of file and the battery usage is unnoticeable. It seems to me that the people who bash XMPP are people who never actually used it and they are just echoing myths from the last decade.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  It seems to me that the people who bash XMPP are people who never actually used it and they are just echoing myths from the last decade. That's my take as well. At this point "XMPP sucks on mobile" seems to be just an outdated meme that keeps replicating itself, but has little actual relevance.
- grahamburger 10y ago
  Agreed, I used the Xabber client on Android for years to keep in touch with our entire remote team (20ish people) using a basically out of the box ejabberd server. Never noticed poor battery life or heavy bandwidth usage and the communication was rock solid. Switching back and forth between desktop clients and mobile worked as expected with no weird surprises. All around a great experience, and this was 2011 ish through 2014.
- stonogo 10y ago
  >It seems to me that the people who bash XMPP are people who never actually used it and they are just echoing myths from the last decade. In the interest of productive discourse, I'm not going to react to the suggestion that I'm an ignoramus who just parrots ancient usenet posts. I'll merely mention it, because I want you to understand that this sort of response does not provide for a discussion of the technical merits of a communications protocol. Yes, XMPP advocates are continually providing anecdata about how wonderful things have been lately. My problem is that I've been running XMPP/Jabber servers for over a decade, at several different institutions with wildly varying deployment needs... and not once has it ever been a good experience. The failure modes vary, it's true. Sometimes it has been a matter of sheer bandwidth consumption, such as communications over satellite uplink. Sometimes the problem has been interoperability across a federated network. Sometimes the problem has been with specific clients, both commercial and FOSS. But there have always been problems. There are other protocols and solutions that have been far less painful to run, but this is not a discussion about $protocol, it's a discussion about XMPP. Honestly, I'd rather see XMPP win. The best-case deployment scenario for it is miles above the best-case for most other protocols. But every time someone brings up limitations, the drumbeat starts: "we're working on an XEP for that, implementation coming soon" "you're just rehashing complaints from five years ago" "this wouldn't be a problem if you'd stop using $server_one and switch to $server_two" "that client doesn't work with $server_two, change the client" ad infinitum.
y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago
> I tried to find XMPP/Jabber clients for S40 phones for YEARS, and every single one I found would immediately crash with OOM errors. > It's easy to blow off complaints like mine, because everyone on hackernews has a Samsung Universe S2000 or an iPhone 128 Plus, but these are real concerns that real people have in the real world. I am using Conversations with my family and friends on a prosody server I put on a kimsufi server. It works like a charm, and we don't have all super awesome android phones (but I have to agree, nobody has an S40. Do they even exist anymore?). I think your experience is outdated and not correct anymore.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  > Do they even exist anymore? Maybe not S40 exactly but there are still plenty of "dumb" phones. It was only 3 years ago that smartphones started to outsell dumb phones [0]. In America, there are still ~24 million "dumb" phone shipped each year [1]. They are still around, people do still use them. [0]: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/smartphones-outsell-dumb-phones-globally/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/smartphones-outsell-dumb-ph... [1]: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/157114/20160510/u-s-flip-phone-and-other-dumb-phone-sales-grew-by-2-million-last-year-but-why.htm http://www.techtimes.com/articles/157114/20160510/u-s-flip-p...
  - codedokode 10y ago
    I have a "dumb" phone but I don't expect it to be able to run a XMPP client. Even if it could, it's screen is too small and there are only numeric keys.
    - rakoo 10y ago
      And yet you can send SMS with a dumb phone; why wouldn't be able to at least send such simple messages with XMPP or any messaging client ?
- SamWhited 10y ago
  > Samsung Universe S2000 Not to be confused with the Honda Galaxy S III
thefastlane 10y ago
do you (or anyone) have a recommendation for an alternative open-standard protocol?
- stephenr 10y ago
  From the comment, his alternative seems to be WhatsApp. Which is built on XMPP. So.. no?
  - dluciv 10y ago
    Propietary license and held by Facebook. As open as possible lol %)
  - stonogo 10y ago
    For the record, WhatsApp is in no way my recommended replacement. For obvious reasons it's completely inapplicable for intranet or institutional use. I mentioned it only because the original article made the comparison.
- zdkl 10y ago
  matrix.org ?
- dluciv 10y ago
  I vote for matrix.org It is open and federated. Compared to XMPP it is overweight a bit, but at least it has sane mobile and browser clients and keeps all history in sync out of the box.
mynameislegion 10y ago
In the same vein, see this comment from the same article a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826855
Zash 10y ago
> Related: [comment from 1977 days ago] Yes, people have been bashing XMPP forever. http://stpeter.im/journal/1384.html http://stpeter.im/journal/1384.html The XMPP protocol is quite qualified to compete with WhatsApp, considering they are using XMPP (with some custom non-standard compression). XMPP is a fine protocol. Just because a bunch of people has been chanting "XMPP is a just a bad protocol" over and over does not make it true.
- stephenr 10y ago
  The irony (yes, actual irony, not coincidence for once) of someone saying "XMPP sucks, WhatsApp has their shit together" is both tragic and hilarious, and completely summarises the majority of "Forget XMPP its dead" arguments. I also don't really get the fucking obsession with 'xml sucks'. Like most things, it has its uses, and abuses. The fucking hoops people jump through to make something like JSON work even halfway as well in particular scenarios are a joke in and of themselves.
e12e 10y ago
I'm not sure I follow this line of reasoning, there appears to be different, unrelated claims here: 1) xmpp, when encrypted and compressed, is inherently chatty and leads to battery drain on mobile. I don't think this is true. 2) Managed services are easier to use, and can deliver a better user experience than having to learn how to do everything yourself. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. I don't think it follows that picking a subset of xmpp and building on that makes for a poor chat experience. Apart from "actual" xmpp/jabber services working just fine, Google talk and Facebook chat both worked fine with open xmpp clients.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dlitz 10y ago
  XMPP "when encrypted and compressed" seems fairly pointless; it's insecure. The CRIME attack demonstrated that compress-then-encrypt fails to provide confidentiality if it mixes confidential data with attacker-controlled data.
  - e12e 10y ago
    CRIME allows for the recovery of certain parts of the cipher text, by sending many requests. I don't see an easy way to use it to apply it to xmpp (or imap). In https, it is possible to enumerate certain headers, or other predictable data - session cookies in particular. How would you leverage the use of compression to attack xmpp?
    - Zash 10y ago
      Not easy, but it can be applied to XMPP: https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2014/08/07/https-attacks-and-xmpp-2-crime-and-breach/ https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2014/08/07/https-attacks-an...
      - e12e 10y ago
        Interesting. Perhaps digest auth should make a comeback with tls. [and rate-limiting logins, obviously, as well as 2fa etc]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
int_19h 10y ago
I've used Bombus on my Nokia 6300 without any troubles for quite some time back in the day. The problem with OOM was actually pretty common for J2ME apps in general, because of how widely the phones differed in their specs, and how little heap they often exposed to J2ME.

by stonogo 10y ago

Flowdalic 10y ago

Your claim that XMPP is a bandwidth-hungry, but in my experience, if XMPP based systems drain battery and consume a lot of bandwidth, then it's because of a poor implementation and design decisions, and not because of the protocol.

roblabla 10y ago
But your average user doesn't care about the distinction. If their XMPP-branded client is battery hungry, they're not going to look for another client. They're going to think xmpp is battery hungry and move on. That's where the problem is.
- mkhpalm 10y ago
  But XMPP is a standard protocol... not a client or library. Should we all abandon HTTP because IE6 sucked? Thats the logical equivalent to the argument.
  - labster 10y ago
    Yes. Everything should use HTTPS now.
  - roblabla 10y ago
    There are two key differences : - There was no real alternative to the web. - More importantly, ie6 worked for the end-user. It only sucked for the developers.
- stephenr 10y ago
  You're not giving people enough credit. They were able to identify that MSIE as a browser was terrible, and switch to Firefox/Chrome/etc.
  - roblabla 10y ago
    And yet MSIE still ruled the earth as a major pain in the foot in 2010, with a whooping 40% marketshare[0] (All versions of ie). It's only when chrome started doing very aggressive advertising that people started to switch. MSIE worked for most people. The devs suffered how bad it was, but the people didn't see that because most of the web was designed for it. That's the kind of power you get when you are lead in marketshare. We see that nowadays with websites that only work in chrome (though it's less of a problem, chrome is a lot more open to standards, and the engine is open source). Concerning branding, I still see a lot of people that think the internet is that "e" icon on their desktop. Other people think chrome is the only gateway to the internet. It's the same situation as when IE6 was the lead. People don't know about alternatives, or don't care. Either way, if their "internet app" sucks, it's generally that internet sucks. [0] Using https://www.w3counter.com/trends https://www.w3counter.com/trends as a source, don't know how accurate it is but it does match my memory of how it all happened.
    - stephenr 10y ago
      > And yet MSIE still ruled the earth as a major pain in the foot in 2010, with a whooping 40% marketshare That was largely related to large install bases in corporate/government/educational institutions where legacy requirements (e.g. we built/bought this IE-optimised internal mission-critical web app, and it shits its pants in other browsers). > It's only when chrome started doing very aggressive advertising that people started to switch. In 2010 Statcounter and W3 counter both give MSIE ~50% and Firefox ~30%. There was huge shift away from MSIE long before Chrome existed, and longer still before they started using shitty tactics to 'encourage' people to change from other perfectly functioning modern browsers.

sweden 10y ago

People are always bashing XMPP around but truth to be told, my experience with the Android client Conversations is pretty damn good. I use the Android client with a personal XMPP server based on Prosody and I frequently use it to communicate with a friend who is also running his own XMPP server and the experience is very good. We never lost a message, we can share pictures just like in WhatsApp, we can send any type of file and the battery usage is unnoticeable. It seems to me that the people who bash XMPP are people who never actually used it and they are just echoing myths from the last decade.

mindcrime 10y ago
It seems to me that the people who bash XMPP are people who never actually used it and they are just echoing myths from the last decade. That's my take as well. At this point "XMPP sucks on mobile" seems to be just an outdated meme that keeps replicating itself, but has little actual relevance.
grahamburger 10y ago
Agreed, I used the Xabber client on Android for years to keep in touch with our entire remote team (20ish people) using a basically out of the box ejabberd server. Never noticed poor battery life or heavy bandwidth usage and the communication was rock solid. Switching back and forth between desktop clients and mobile worked as expected with no weird surprises. All around a great experience, and this was 2011 ish through 2014.
stonogo 10y ago
>It seems to me that the people who bash XMPP are people who never actually used it and they are just echoing myths from the last decade. In the interest of productive discourse, I'm not going to react to the suggestion that I'm an ignoramus who just parrots ancient usenet posts. I'll merely mention it, because I want you to understand that this sort of response does not provide for a discussion of the technical merits of a communications protocol. Yes, XMPP advocates are continually providing anecdata about how wonderful things have been lately. My problem is that I've been running XMPP/Jabber servers for over a decade, at several different institutions with wildly varying deployment needs... and not once has it ever been a good experience. The failure modes vary, it's true. Sometimes it has been a matter of sheer bandwidth consumption, such as communications over satellite uplink. Sometimes the problem has been interoperability across a federated network. Sometimes the problem has been with specific clients, both commercial and FOSS. But there have always been problems. There are other protocols and solutions that have been far less painful to run, but this is not a discussion about $protocol, it's a discussion about XMPP. Honestly, I'd rather see XMPP win. The best-case deployment scenario for it is miles above the best-case for most other protocols. But every time someone brings up limitations, the drumbeat starts: "we're working on an XEP for that, implementation coming soon" "you're just rehashing complaints from five years ago" "this wouldn't be a problem if you'd stop using $server_one and switch to $server_two" "that client doesn't work with $server_two, change the client" ad infinitum.

y0ghur7_xxx 10y ago

> I tried to find XMPP/Jabber clients for S40 phones for YEARS, and every single one I found would immediately crash with OOM errors. > It's easy to blow off complaints like mine, because everyone on hackernews has a Samsung Universe S2000 or an iPhone 128 Plus, but these are real concerns that real people have in the real world. I am using Conversations with my family and friends on a prosody server I put on a kimsufi server. It works like a charm, and we don't have all super awesome android phones (but I have to agree, nobody has an S40. Do they even exist anymore?). I think your experience is outdated and not correct anymore.

Veratyr 10y ago
> Do they even exist anymore? Maybe not S40 exactly but there are still plenty of "dumb" phones. It was only 3 years ago that smartphones started to outsell dumb phones [0]. In America, there are still ~24 million "dumb" phone shipped each year [1]. They are still around, people do still use them. [0]: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/smartphones-outsell-dumb-phones-globally/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/smartphones-outsell-dumb-ph... [1]: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/157114/20160510/u-s-flip-phone-and-other-dumb-phone-sales-grew-by-2-million-last-year-but-why.htm http://www.techtimes.com/articles/157114/20160510/u-s-flip-p...
- codedokode 10y ago
  I have a "dumb" phone but I don't expect it to be able to run a XMPP client. Even if it could, it's screen is too small and there are only numeric keys.
  - rakoo 10y ago
    And yet you can send SMS with a dumb phone; why wouldn't be able to at least send such simple messages with XMPP or any messaging client ?
SamWhited 10y ago
> Samsung Universe S2000 Not to be confused with the Honda Galaxy S III

thefastlane 10y ago

do you (or anyone) have a recommendation for an alternative open-standard protocol?

stephenr 10y ago
From the comment, his alternative seems to be WhatsApp. Which is built on XMPP. So.. no?
- dluciv 10y ago
  Propietary license and held by Facebook. As open as possible lol %)
- stonogo 10y ago
  For the record, WhatsApp is in no way my recommended replacement. For obvious reasons it's completely inapplicable for intranet or institutional use. I mentioned it only because the original article made the comparison.
zdkl 10y ago
matrix.org ?
dluciv 10y ago
I vote for matrix.org It is open and federated. Compared to XMPP it is overweight a bit, but at least it has sane mobile and browser clients and keeps all history in sync out of the box.

mynameislegion 10y ago

In the same vein, see this comment from the same article a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826855

Zash 10y ago

> Related: [comment from 1977 days ago] Yes, people have been bashing XMPP forever. http://stpeter.im/journal/1384.html http://stpeter.im/journal/1384.html The XMPP protocol is quite qualified to compete with WhatsApp, considering they are using XMPP (with some custom non-standard compression). XMPP is a fine protocol. Just because a bunch of people has been chanting "XMPP is a just a bad protocol" over and over does not make it true.

stephenr 10y ago
The irony (yes, actual irony, not coincidence for once) of someone saying "XMPP sucks, WhatsApp has their shit together" is both tragic and hilarious, and completely summarises the majority of "Forget XMPP its dead" arguments. I also don't really get the fucking obsession with 'xml sucks'. Like most things, it has its uses, and abuses. The fucking hoops people jump through to make something like JSON work even halfway as well in particular scenarios are a joke in and of themselves.

e12e 10y ago

I'm not sure I follow this line of reasoning, there appears to be different, unrelated claims here: 1) xmpp, when encrypted and compressed, is inherently chatty and leads to battery drain on mobile. I don't think this is true. 2) Managed services are easier to use, and can deliver a better user experience than having to learn how to do everything yourself. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. I don't think it follows that picking a subset of xmpp and building on that makes for a poor chat experience. Apart from "actual" xmpp/jabber services working just fine, Google talk and Facebook chat both worked fine with open xmpp clients.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dlitz 10y ago
XMPP "when encrypted and compressed" seems fairly pointless; it's insecure. The CRIME attack demonstrated that compress-then-encrypt fails to provide confidentiality if it mixes confidential data with attacker-controlled data.
- e12e 10y ago
  CRIME allows for the recovery of certain parts of the cipher text, by sending many requests. I don't see an easy way to use it to apply it to xmpp (or imap). In https, it is possible to enumerate certain headers, or other predictable data - session cookies in particular. How would you leverage the use of compression to attack xmpp?
  - Zash 10y ago
    Not easy, but it can be applied to XMPP: https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2014/08/07/https-attacks-and-xmpp-2-crime-and-breach/ https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2014/08/07/https-attacks-an...
    - e12e 10y ago
      Interesting. Perhaps digest auth should make a comeback with tls. [and rate-limiting logins, obviously, as well as 2fa etc]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

int_19h 10y ago

I've used Bombus on my Nokia 6300 without any troubles for quite some time back in the day. The problem with OOM was actually pretty common for J2ME apps in general, because of how widely the phones differed in their specs, and how little heap they often exposed to J2ME.