5 ms·

As an Internet user in Singapore, I have a very close experience with Internet Latency. On average, even an excellent Internet connection (Fibre 100 Mbit/s) in

As an Internet user in Singapore, I have a very close experience with Internet Latency. On average, even an excellent Internet connection (Fibre 100 Mbit/s) in Singapore has about 240ms latency when communicating with a US server at West, or about 320ms at East. Skype calls with these latencies are still acceptable. However, there are many websites using SSL without a cache, and causing the overhead time to be 3 times longer (due to much more handshakes). Unfortunately, Basecamp uses a lot of redirects (3 redirects to a Whiteboard). This means that I have to wait for 2-3 seconds for each page to start loading! I know light speed is not something we can change, but the key is, don't use SSL unnecessarily. Even if you have to use SSL, try to implement a cache to save users' time. I believe that many Internet users outside of US are just like me, start to hate HTTPS websites intuitively. To us, they are just much much slower. Singapore has one of the fastest Internet connections in the world, especially among English-speaking countries (US website visitors). But latency is always a very big problem that many people are not aware of. I'm surprised that this issue was mentioned as far as 15 years ago! Edit: spelling, expression.

beder 16y ago
Slightly off-topic, but what is a cache for SSL? That is, what exactly is being cached, and who's doing it? I ask because I'm writing a little API (both server/client) that uses SSL, and just connecting can be brutally long - so I might be doing something wrong here.
- zhoutong 16y ago
  Well, I think I may have used the inaccurate term. The cache for SSL has two parts: # You need to reuse the session, instead of forcing the client to do the full handshake every time. # You can consider setting a high Keep-Alive value to improve the performance by avoiding long overhead time.
  - pornel 16y ago
    In addition to reuse of SSL sessions, files downloaded over HTTPS can be cacheable as well — you just need to add: Cache-Control: max-age=<number of seconds> this way you'll eliminate roundtrip needed for redownload/cache validation.

beder 16y ago

Slightly off-topic, but what is a cache for SSL? That is, what exactly is being cached, and who's doing it? I ask because I'm writing a little API (both server/client) that uses SSL, and just connecting can be brutally long - so I might be doing something wrong here.

zhoutong 16y ago
Well, I think I may have used the inaccurate term. The cache for SSL has two parts: # You need to reuse the session, instead of forcing the client to do the full handshake every time. # You can consider setting a high Keep-Alive value to improve the performance by avoiding long overhead time.
- pornel 16y ago
  In addition to reuse of SSL sessions, files downloaded over HTTPS can be cacheable as well — you just need to add: Cache-Control: max-age=<number of seconds> this way you'll eliminate roundtrip needed for redownload/cache validation.