4 ms·

Lightspeed is still an issue. I've done remote development and it sucks. Even with gigabit connections, ~150ms latency can kill you. Maybe you can keep the edi

by juancn 4y ago

Lightspeed is still an issue. I've done remote development and it sucks. Even with gigabit connections, ~150ms latency can kill you. Maybe you can keep the editor local, and have it hide the latency for you, but debugging? With anything over a few ms latency remote debugging is impossible (or at least extremely annoying). Step over? Wait a few seconds to a minute until the debugger issues one call to get each variable in scope and all the other goodies. Debuggers assume local environments, we would need new tooling that's latency aware to handle this, in every major language and platform. I don't see this being good enough for serious dev work in a long time. It will work for some niches though, specially if you're close enough to the datacenter hosting your infrastructure. In a sense, a local git repo with an IDE, and a cloud unit/integration testing pipeline is as close as we get now, but every once in a while, you need to run at least a little bit locally to be productive.

zaptrem 4y ago
Even with a crappy DSL connection I haven't routinely seen >70ms latency for years. Modern cable/fiber/LTE/NR connections are all well under 50ms. Even then, we have realtime games with lag compensation that make that connection instant. Your problem sounds like a badly written app, not a tech limitation.
- sophacles 4y ago
  What definition of latency are you using here?
- falcolas 4y ago
  > connections are all well under 50ms This depends entirely upon where you're connecting to, and from. For example, I can't connect to us-east-1 servers with under 50ms of latency, because I'm out in the rural west, and my connections run a thousand miles south before getting on a good east/west backbone. Spikes are not uncommon. > we have realtime games with lag compensation that make that connection instant When the prediction algorithms are correct. When they're not, you start seeing some uncanny behavior that you can't predict or compensate for (dead-on shots missing, actions being rolled back, etc).
- tomc1985 4y ago
  Where you live, sure. But I can drive just a couple hours north of San Francisco and lose all cellular connectivity, entirely. In fact I am doing just that tonight and my friend and I have made contingency plans for meeting up at a festival going on in the mountains off the 101, where we expect to have no cell service. I really wish people would set aside their "well it's always worked for me, surely it must work for everyone" attitude, because it is tragically and obnoxiously false.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  So now we have to build real-time lag compensation into our dev tools?
- sph 4y ago
  I'm in London, my fancy iPhone on 4G is fast enough, yet it averages 100ms latency, as measured by ping. Explain that.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  Latency is affected more by geographical location than your local internet connection. If you're in San Francisco connecting to a server in London, it's a physical impossibility to get under ~60 ms, and that's assuming a direct signal going across the surface of the planet at the speed of light. In reality, it's not direct, and there will be at least a couple dozen routers between.
- juancn 4y ago
  I live in Argentina, anything in the US is at least 150ms away.
discreteevent 4y ago
Debugging won't be a problem if the dev environment is on the cloud. 100ms latency works fine with Remote Desktop Protocol when typing. However, I don't agree with the article for other reasons.
- viraptor 4y ago
  It really doesn't work well. As in, people who touch type are slowed down if there's 100ms delay. Moving the cursor around is also awkward, because you're often pressing a key multiple times per second or rely on repeat rate which does the same. I do it once a week or so (for a very short time) and would rage quit any job requiring this every day.
  - spc476 4y ago
    I have to fill in a "time card" each week. The old system was a simple web page that I could navigate primarily via keyboard, tabbing from field to field. I think it was a company-developed web app, so the people who made it also had to use it. Then that was scrapped for an "enterprise solution." This is is also a web app, but it's slow. You have to click in a field, watch as the selection menus are filled in in a second or two (as the gigabytes of Javascript pulls data in via a database query in real time), and if it's a text field, you have to click in it, type real slowly, and click out of it. Don't tab to the next field because the tab key doesn't work as expected. What used to take a few seconds to fill out a days' worth of time now takes a few minutes. The C-suite, who bought into this crap, don't have to use it because that's what secretaries^Wassistants are for. If this is the future of computing, I want off at the next stop.
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      At work we have a support portal, to help customer support folks out. It relies on queries through a legacy service to a legacy DB. Increased row counts in the DB (ish because this isn't SQL) have caused high query latency resulting in frequent timeouts, and the legacy service that manages the queries keeps constantly timing out. Our team owns it but management will never sign off on resources to fix it. None of the technical staff or upper management at the company uses the support portal so they don't care. Support folks don't have any way of offering feedback to us or our management in a way that threatens our careers. The result is that it never gets worked on and support continues complaining without anything ever happening. I spent my free time coming up with fixes but ran out of time to tie up loose ends. I'll be tasking an intern with doing that, so the support people can finally use the portal and not want to rip their hair out. This is what happens when you aren't forced to use a system and customer feedback has no effect on you, as is the case for most enterprise software. Have you tried to use Puppeteer or Selenium to automate the timecard entry? That might help reduce the pain.
treis 4y ago
>Maybe you can keep the editor local, and have it hide the latency for you, but debugging? >With anything over a few ms latency remote debugging is impossible (or at least extremely annoying). Step over? Wait a few seconds to a minute until the debugger issues one call to get each variable in scope and all the other goodies. Feel like this is similar to how Dropbox started. In that, the reasons given for why it wouldn't work were based on how previous solutions sucked. So yeah, if your debugger takes a minute to work then it'd suck. But what if it didn't?
- juancn 4y ago
  Maybe, but this needs to be solved for each language/platform. Anyway, I didn't say it wouldn't work, I said it wouldn't work soon.
pjmlp 4y ago
I have done enough debugging using graphical debuggers on X Windows sessions. It is so ironic to see the pendulum swing back to how I used to code in UNIX environments 30 years ago, while being told it is impossible to have worked like that. Not only that, using development VMs has been a constant for me since 2011, either via Citrix or RDP.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Plenty of secure dev environments work like that.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Yes, it is much easier to control what gets into the building that way. It also has the advantage that setting up a new developer account is relatively fast.
- eatonphil 4y ago
  > Not only that, using development VMs has been a constant for me since 2011, either via Citrix or RDP. I do most development out of a baremetal hosted server in Canada. But I think the original article is talking more about using cloud services like cloud editors, cloud databases, rather than using a VM or server hosted by someone else where you have root access and run all your stuff (editor, databases, etc.) there.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Usually those machines are mostly managed by IT and anything related to configuration changes usually requires some form of IT change request, or using a cut down version of root, project specific. Personally I have only had proper root access, when I am part of infrastructure team.
namaria 4y ago
Really, stumbling on a fallacy as basic as "the network is reliable" shows how poorly thought out this whole piece is.

by juancn 4y ago

zaptrem 4y ago

Even with a crappy DSL connection I haven't routinely seen >70ms latency for years. Modern cable/fiber/LTE/NR connections are all well under 50ms. Even then, we have realtime games with lag compensation that make that connection instant. Your problem sounds like a badly written app, not a tech limitation.

sophacles 4y ago
What definition of latency are you using here?
falcolas 4y ago
> connections are all well under 50ms This depends entirely upon where you're connecting to, and from. For example, I can't connect to us-east-1 servers with under 50ms of latency, because I'm out in the rural west, and my connections run a thousand miles south before getting on a good east/west backbone. Spikes are not uncommon. > we have realtime games with lag compensation that make that connection instant When the prediction algorithms are correct. When they're not, you start seeing some uncanny behavior that you can't predict or compensate for (dead-on shots missing, actions being rolled back, etc).
tomc1985 4y ago
Where you live, sure. But I can drive just a couple hours north of San Francisco and lose all cellular connectivity, entirely. In fact I am doing just that tonight and my friend and I have made contingency plans for meeting up at a festival going on in the mountains off the 101, where we expect to have no cell service. I really wish people would set aside their "well it's always worked for me, surely it must work for everyone" attitude, because it is tragically and obnoxiously false.
doctor_eval 4y ago
So now we have to build real-time lag compensation into our dev tools?
sph 4y ago
I'm in London, my fancy iPhone on 4G is fast enough, yet it averages 100ms latency, as measured by ping. Explain that.
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
Latency is affected more by geographical location than your local internet connection. If you're in San Francisco connecting to a server in London, it's a physical impossibility to get under ~60 ms, and that's assuming a direct signal going across the surface of the planet at the speed of light. In reality, it's not direct, and there will be at least a couple dozen routers between.
juancn 4y ago
I live in Argentina, anything in the US is at least 150ms away.

discreteevent 4y ago

Debugging won't be a problem if the dev environment is on the cloud. 100ms latency works fine with Remote Desktop Protocol when typing. However, I don't agree with the article for other reasons.

viraptor 4y ago
It really doesn't work well. As in, people who touch type are slowed down if there's 100ms delay. Moving the cursor around is also awkward, because you're often pressing a key multiple times per second or rely on repeat rate which does the same. I do it once a week or so (for a very short time) and would rage quit any job requiring this every day.
- spc476 4y ago
  I have to fill in a "time card" each week. The old system was a simple web page that I could navigate primarily via keyboard, tabbing from field to field. I think it was a company-developed web app, so the people who made it also had to use it. Then that was scrapped for an "enterprise solution." This is is also a web app, but it's slow. You have to click in a field, watch as the selection menus are filled in in a second or two (as the gigabytes of Javascript pulls data in via a database query in real time), and if it's a text field, you have to click in it, type real slowly, and click out of it. Don't tab to the next field because the tab key doesn't work as expected. What used to take a few seconds to fill out a days' worth of time now takes a few minutes. The C-suite, who bought into this crap, don't have to use it because that's what secretaries^Wassistants are for. If this is the future of computing, I want off at the next stop.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    At work we have a support portal, to help customer support folks out. It relies on queries through a legacy service to a legacy DB. Increased row counts in the DB (ish because this isn't SQL) have caused high query latency resulting in frequent timeouts, and the legacy service that manages the queries keeps constantly timing out. Our team owns it but management will never sign off on resources to fix it. None of the technical staff or upper management at the company uses the support portal so they don't care. Support folks don't have any way of offering feedback to us or our management in a way that threatens our careers. The result is that it never gets worked on and support continues complaining without anything ever happening. I spent my free time coming up with fixes but ran out of time to tie up loose ends. I'll be tasking an intern with doing that, so the support people can finally use the portal and not want to rip their hair out. This is what happens when you aren't forced to use a system and customer feedback has no effect on you, as is the case for most enterprise software. Have you tried to use Puppeteer or Selenium to automate the timecard entry? That might help reduce the pain.

treis 4y ago

>Maybe you can keep the editor local, and have it hide the latency for you, but debugging? >With anything over a few ms latency remote debugging is impossible (or at least extremely annoying). Step over? Wait a few seconds to a minute until the debugger issues one call to get each variable in scope and all the other goodies. Feel like this is similar to how Dropbox started. In that, the reasons given for why it wouldn't work were based on how previous solutions sucked. So yeah, if your debugger takes a minute to work then it'd suck. But what if it didn't?

juancn 4y ago
Maybe, but this needs to be solved for each language/platform. Anyway, I didn't say it wouldn't work, I said it wouldn't work soon.

pjmlp 4y ago

I have done enough debugging using graphical debuggers on X Windows sessions. It is so ironic to see the pendulum swing back to how I used to code in UNIX environments 30 years ago, while being told it is impossible to have worked like that. Not only that, using development VMs has been a constant for me since 2011, either via Citrix or RDP.

jacquesm 4y ago
Plenty of secure dev environments work like that.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Yes, it is much easier to control what gets into the building that way. It also has the advantage that setting up a new developer account is relatively fast.
eatonphil 4y ago
> Not only that, using development VMs has been a constant for me since 2011, either via Citrix or RDP. I do most development out of a baremetal hosted server in Canada. But I think the original article is talking more about using cloud services like cloud editors, cloud databases, rather than using a VM or server hosted by someone else where you have root access and run all your stuff (editor, databases, etc.) there.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Usually those machines are mostly managed by IT and anything related to configuration changes usually requires some form of IT change request, or using a cut down version of root, project specific. Personally I have only had proper root access, when I am part of infrastructure team.

namaria 4y ago

Really, stumbling on a fallacy as basic as "the network is reliable" shows how poorly thought out this whole piece is.