3 ms·

Throughput of networks is increasing but latency doesn’t improve as much (although 5G wireless is a big improvement over 4G LTE). Also TCP slow-start limits how

by fmajid 4y ago

Throughput of networks is increasing but latency doesn’t improve as much (although 5G wireless is a big improvement over 4G LTE). Also TCP slow-start limits how fast an HTTP connection can go, and most are short-lived so the connection is still ramping up when it is closed. That’s one of the supposed benefits of QUIC a.k.a. HTTP/3. And then there is bloat, the scourge of JavaScript frameworks and what passes for front-end development nowadays.

RF_Savage 4y ago
On mobile latency has constantly improved. GPRS/EDGE was often +100ms ping --> 3G 400-50ms depending on the day --> 4G/LTE 50-30ms and now I'm often getting sub-20ms ping on 5G connections.
- fmajid 4y ago
  Yes, moving from voice-centric to IP-centric network technology has helped, and 5G paid laudable attention to latency. Their target for 5G is actually 1ms, but of course backhaul will dominate that.
  - gsich 4y ago
    1ms only to the tower.
    - fmajid 4y ago
      Yes, backhaul (the connection from the tower to the Internet via the carrier's central facilities) dominates, as well as queueing latency for packets waiting to be delivered to phones, since traffic is overwhelmingly downloads.
  - gnyman 4y ago
    I had heard the 1 ms number also and did some research some time ago. As far as I understood the 1 ms is for specialised low latency connections and devices not for the every day browsing. Here are two sources which I found useful at that time https://broadbandlibrary.com/5g-low-latency-requirements/ https://broadbandlibrary.com/5g-low-latency-requirements/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-talk-low-latency-dean-bubley https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-talk-low-latency-dean...
    - fmajid 4y ago
      Yes, I subscribe to Dean Bubley and he is a very useful corrective to the telco boosterism on things like overselling 5G, network slicing, the dumpster fire that is RCS and so on. Still, it's important that latency is top of mind for the designers of 5G, as it gets short shrift far too often.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
> and then there is bloat, the scourge of JavaScript frameworks and what passes for front-end development nowadays. It keeps getting worse. When I do web app security assessments, I end up with a logfile of all requests/responses made during browsing a site. The sizes of these logfiles have ballooned over the past few years, even controlling for site complexity. Many megabytes of JS shit, images, etc being loaded and often without being cached properly (so they get reloaded every time). A lot of it is first party framework bloat (webdev active choices), but a lot is third party bloat - all the adtech and other garbage that gets loaded every time (also without cacheing) for analytics and tracking.
- acdha 4y ago
  > but a lot is third party bloat - all the adtech and other garbage that gets loaded every time (also without cacheing) for analytics and tracking. This is also amusing from a change management process at large organizations: want to tweak an Apache setting? Spend a month getting CAB approval and wait for a deployment window. Want to inject unreviewed JavaScript onto every page in the domain? Login to Adobe…
- fmajid 4y ago
  Yes, and it's not as if tools like Google's Lighthouse/PageSpeedInsights or Mozilla's Firefox Profiler haven't been available for years. Economists and lawmakers have determined that the economic benefits of personalization accrue to the ad middlemen like Google, not to the publishers who have to encumber their sites with all the surveillance beacons, but the reality of the market is publishers have no leverage. That said, most of those beacons are set with the async/defer attribute and should not have a measurable on page load speed.

by fmajid 4y ago

RF_Savage 4y ago

On mobile latency has constantly improved. GPRS/EDGE was often +100ms ping --> 3G 400-50ms depending on the day --> 4G/LTE 50-30ms and now I'm often getting sub-20ms ping on 5G connections.

fmajid 4y ago
Yes, moving from voice-centric to IP-centric network technology has helped, and 5G paid laudable attention to latency. Their target for 5G is actually 1ms, but of course backhaul will dominate that.
- gsich 4y ago
  1ms only to the tower.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    Yes, backhaul (the connection from the tower to the Internet via the carrier's central facilities) dominates, as well as queueing latency for packets waiting to be delivered to phones, since traffic is overwhelmingly downloads.
- gnyman 4y ago
  I had heard the 1 ms number also and did some research some time ago. As far as I understood the 1 ms is for specialised low latency connections and devices not for the every day browsing. Here are two sources which I found useful at that time https://broadbandlibrary.com/5g-low-latency-requirements/ https://broadbandlibrary.com/5g-low-latency-requirements/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-talk-low-latency-dean-bubley https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-talk-low-latency-dean...
  - fmajid 4y ago
    Yes, I subscribe to Dean Bubley and he is a very useful corrective to the telco boosterism on things like overselling 5G, network slicing, the dumpster fire that is RCS and so on. Still, it's important that latency is top of mind for the designers of 5G, as it gets short shrift far too often.

nibbleshifter 4y ago

> and then there is bloat, the scourge of JavaScript frameworks and what passes for front-end development nowadays. It keeps getting worse. When I do web app security assessments, I end up with a logfile of all requests/responses made during browsing a site. The sizes of these logfiles have ballooned over the past few years, even controlling for site complexity. Many megabytes of JS shit, images, etc being loaded and often without being cached properly (so they get reloaded every time). A lot of it is first party framework bloat (webdev active choices), but a lot is third party bloat - all the adtech and other garbage that gets loaded every time (also without cacheing) for analytics and tracking.

acdha 4y ago
> but a lot is third party bloat - all the adtech and other garbage that gets loaded every time (also without cacheing) for analytics and tracking. This is also amusing from a change management process at large organizations: want to tweak an Apache setting? Spend a month getting CAB approval and wait for a deployment window. Want to inject unreviewed JavaScript onto every page in the domain? Login to Adobe…
fmajid 4y ago
Yes, and it's not as if tools like Google's Lighthouse/PageSpeedInsights or Mozilla's Firefox Profiler haven't been available for years. Economists and lawmakers have determined that the economic benefits of personalization accrue to the ad middlemen like Google, not to the publishers who have to encumber their sites with all the surveillance beacons, but the reality of the market is publishers have no leverage. That said, most of those beacons are set with the async/defer attribute and should not have a measurable on page load speed.